Ireland’s change has been 25 years in the making.

IRELAND IS CHANGED, AND CHANGED UTTERLY, BUT IT’S BEEN 25 YEARS IN THE MAKING

It was an historic feminist victory over the rosary-clutching Irish patriarchy, a successful revolt of the young against the old, a triumph of Dublin’s smart and forward-thinking secularists over the priest-ridden Catholic farmers of the countryside. Except it was no such thing. After a thumping 67-per-cent majority of Irish voters cast their ballots last Friday to repeal the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland quite properly offered congratulations from Ottawa, and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna exchanged high-fives with Canada’s ambassador to Ireland, Kevin Vickers.

And fair enough, too, but Ireland has not suddenly joined the ranks of quite the same liberal, feminist universe where quite a few Canadians seem to think our own country shines like some sort of lodestar. In one key respect, the opposite is true. While Ireland’s abortion ban was an outlier in the developed world, Canada is now the outlier.

There are no statutory restrictions on abortion in Canada, and the consensus among Canada’s political parties is that the issue is best left alone. In Ireland, the consensus is now that the issue cannot be simply left alone. Leading up to last weekend’s referendum, opinion polls showed only a third of Irish voters favour a Canadianstyle legal regime. Unlike the case in Canada, abortion is regulated and restricted in various ways in all of the European Union’s 27 countries. Ireland is simply becoming more European.

The Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution had effectively outlawed abortion in the 26-county Irish republic, prohibiting lawmakers from legislating on the subject and forcing Irishwomen, even in cases of rape, to travel to Britain for abortions. From Fiánna Fail on the right to Sinn Féin on the left, Ireland’s mainstream political parties are now divided only marginally and only in the details of what sort of regulations and restrictions should be included in a post-referendum abortion law.

Whatever the Catholic hierarchy had to say on the subject — as you might imagine, Ireland’s Catholic bishops and priests urged the faithful to cast “no” votes — roughly two-thirds of voters who professed to be committed Irish Catholics voted “yes” to repeal the Eighth Amendment. Paradoxically, with the possible exception of Poland, the most severe restrictions on access to abortion in all of Europe are now to be found in the six-county, Protestant-majority statelet of Northern Ireland.

It is quite true that older Irish people tended to vote against the tide. But Ireland is a young country. Only about 12 per cent of population is over 65, and even in that demographic about 40 per cent voted to repeal the abortion ban.

Neither was the abortion ban merely a misogynistic holdover from the grim and dreary days of Éamon de Valera’s stagnant, cold republic of the 1950s. Abortion had been outlawed in Ireland from the days of British rule in the 19th century, but the constitutional ban was implemented only in the 1980s, following a two-thirds vote in a referendum in 1983. And now, almost exactly two-thirds of Irish voters cast repeal ballots last Friday. The Irish have simply changed their minds, and it was not so much a throwing-off of “Catholic guilt” that explains it, but rather the shame of the abortion ban itself appears to have most effectively motivated “yes” voters. The injustice of the ban became central to public debates. It will be a long time before Savita Halappanavar will be forgotten.

In November, 2012, Halappanavar died in an Irish hospital after giving birth to a stillborn baby. She had been denied an abortion, even though the doctors knew the birth would result in a miscarriage. The cruelty of the law’s indifference to the suffering of Irishwomen was central to the referendum debates, and the Irish Times is quite right to editorialize that the referendum result is a victory that belongs to the women of Ireland. Even so, Irishmen voted more or less the same way women did — 65 per cent voted to repeal, compared to 70 per cent of women.

While 77 per cent of Dubliners voted to repeal, majorities were carried all across Ireland — even in the poorer, rural counties in the provinces of Connacht and Munster. Only a single constituency in Donegal voted “no,” but that was a low-turnout vote that still hovered only barely in the negative — 52 per cent.

Ireland is changed, and changed utterly, but it has already been more than two decades since the Irish voted to repeal the country’s ban on divorce. Three years ago, Irish voters resoundingly approved same-sex marriage in yet another referendum. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, himself a gay Indo-Irishman, has pointed out that what happened last Friday is part of a “quiet revolution.”

But it’s a revolution that has been underway in Ireland for a quarter of a century already.

THE INJUSTICE OF THE BAN BECAME CENTRAL TO PUBLIC DEBATES.