This will sound familiar to Australians. A leftist government makes a core part of its agenda persuading voters to ‘modernise’ the constitution by backing referendum proposals reflecting its ‘progressive’ social agenda. Rather than explaining in detail the proposed changes, it relies on their right-on ‘vibe’ to carry the day. Polite metropolitan opinion, the media and the corporate establishment strongly support the changes. Unexpected and brutal voter rejection of the proposals produces profound shock and rationalisations that the government didn’t properly explain the case for what in its unshakeable view were worthy reforms. Voters were under-educated, ill-informed and confused.

The parallels between Ireland’s rejection of two referenda on 8 March and the fate of Labor’s Voice proposal are compelling. Still, in some ways Ireland’s emphatic repudiation of the woke left was even more remarkable: whereas in Australia the No case was backed by the Liberal-National opposition, Ireland’s main opposition party, the leftist Sinn Fein, supported the referendum proposals as strongly as the government. So Irish voters gave the middle finger essentially to the entire political class. And, another not insignificant difference from the Australian referendum saga: the Irish Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, accepted responsibility for the humiliation and resigned.

The two Irish referenda were aimed at bringing references to families and women in the country’s 1937 constitution, highly influenced by the Catholic Church, into line with fashionable, ‘inclusive’ sensibilities. One of the proposals was to change the constitutional reference to families as founded on marriage to ‘durable relationships’. This was rejected by 67 per cent of voters. The other change would have deleted references to acknowledging the contribution of women’s ‘life within the home’ and protecting the ability of mothers to carry out their ‘duties in the home’. This was rejected by a landslide 74 per cent, with some blue-collar areas of Dublin recording No votes of 96 per cent.

What happened to the hip, liberal, modern Ireland? The country’s leftist establishment could be forgiven for assuming that the country which over the past decade has accepted seismic social change – same-sex marriage in 2015 and abortion in 2018 – would be even more relaxed about changing arguably archaic constitutional references to women and the family.

The one significant institution which opposed the referendum proposals was the Catholic Church, which said they would weaken marriage and remove the only constitutional references to women and motherhood. Attempting to emphasise that it wanted to remove ‘very old-fashioned, very sexist’ language from the constitution, the government held the referenda on International Women’s Day. That appears to have backfired, only highlighting the proposed constitutional deletions of women and mothers.  Even though the language may have seemed outdated, Ireland’s woke establishment, like the left everywhere, under-estimated the attachment of many people to history, tradition and the family and their corresponding irritation with finger-wagging woke ideologues who want to sweep the past away.

The two dominant parties in Ireland’s coalition government, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, were historically Christian Democrat and conservative. But, like many similar parties in Europe including Britain’s Conservatives and Germany’s Christian Democrats, they’ve steadily drifted to the soggy, eco-woke, open borders, LGBT-sensitive left, and in 2020 formed a coalition government with the Greens. Another factor in the strong No votes appears to have been voters poking the government in the eye for out-of-control immigration. Ireland in 2022 granted asylum to 81,000 illegal arrivals, an astonishing figure for a small country which never accepted more than a few hundred refugees a year until the late 1990s – a recent poll found that 75 per cent of respondents felt the country was ‘taking too many’ newcomers. Many of the recent arrivals are Ukrainian refugees who arrived with government agreement, but numbers of more controversial non-European illegal immigrants have also soared. They have formed a ramshackle tent city in Dublin and have been relocated in large numbers, often doubling the size of small communities in rural Ireland, causing much outrage. Protest movements have gathered steam, especially since last November when three children and a school care assistant were stabbed outside a Dublin primary school by an Algerian-born immigrant.

Over the past year, while retaining the rhetoric of ‘compassion’, the government has tried to slam the brakes on illegal immigrants. In 2023, it rejected 60 per cent of refugee applications, more than three times the rate in 2022. But asylum-seekers continue to arrive in high numbers – usually via the UK from which passports aren’t required – and those initially rejected can appeal. As in most of Europe, asylum-seekers aren’t detained and, if refused refugee status, are rarely deported. The issue remained incendiary for many Irish when they had the opportunity to cast their referendum votes.

Despite the renewed glimpses of the old conservative Ireland seen in the referendum results, the country remains one of the most woke-left places on the planet. It is unique in Europe in not having a significant conservative or anti-immigration party. There is no Irish Nigel Farage. And the government routinely leans left: for example, it’s planning draconian ‘anti-hate’ legislation. It goes to great lengths not to say hurtful things about Hamas: late last year, when the terrorists released Emily Hand, a nine-year Irish-Israeli kidnapped on 7 October, Varadkar tweeted ‘an innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned’, as if she’d disappeared on a camping holiday. And the Irish political establishment is hyper-woke on climate change: in 2022, when Boko Haram murdered forty Christians in Nigeria, President Michael Higgins, an ex-Labour politician, blamed the atrocity on global warming. The new Prime Minister, Simon Harris, is firmly in the Irish establishment’s recent woke-left tradition.

As elections, which have to be held by March 2025, approach, polls show that the coalition government parties are on the nose with voters. But, paradoxically, given Ireland’s outburst of conservative rebellion, Sinn Fein is the favourite to lead the next government. As in Britain, Ireland’s mainstream parties offer a choice between the left and the further left, leaving the political system out of kilter with a significant body of public opinion. So while all signs point to continental Europe continuing its steady shift to the right, the nations of the British Isles for the moment are heading in the opposite direction.