Referendums have changed the law, but not our politics

Forget about travelling back in time for the gay marriage vote, even the abortion poll of two years ago seems like an event from a distant epoch; we can now divide our lives into two separate sections - BC (Before Covid) and AC (After Covid).

But while we may have entered a new era, it's fascinating to remember how the country reacted to those crucial votes - and also to remember just how badly wrong all the forecasters were about how they would shape a new era of Irish politics.

Casting our minds back to the gay marriage vote might be difficult for many of us who now struggle to remember what day it is during the suspended animation of lockdown. But it was a seminal day in Irish history.

I was happy to vote in favour of the change - gay rights had long been a dirty concept in Irish society and we should remember that, incredibly, homosexuality was actually crime in this country until 1993.

So I voted Yes for a variety of reasons. There was the explicit discrimination against a section of society which needed to be redressed. There was the element of showing that old restrictive beliefs of conservative, Catholic Ireland had had their day and we now lived in a new and more modern society.

There was also, as I used to say to annoy my gay mates, the desire to inflict marriage on them in the same way it's inflicted on straight people. But, ultimately, what people do with their own lives is absolutely none of my business and nobody has the right to tell strangers what to do.

The abortion referendum of 2018 was a rather more complicated - and interesting - issue.

I voted for Repeal, but unlike the gay marriage referendum of three years earlier, I did so with a much heavier and more confused heart.

I was, and remain, extremely conflicted on the issue. My reservations aren't based on some ancient text, they're based on some of the horror stories about late-term abortions and the idea of terminating pregnancies that involve a disabled child.

These are not unreasonable qualms - in a world where we like everything to be black and white, abortion is they greyest area of them all.

But ultimately my own feelings about abortion are irrelevant - just as I have no right to tell a gay couple how to live their lives, none of us has the moral authority to tell a woman what to do with her body.

Like many Irish people, I'm pro-choice for the first three months and extremely pro-life for the last three months, with the obvious exception of fatal foetal abnormalities.

But this is what brings me to my point about all the chin-strokers and how they got their predictions so badly wrong.

The one thing we were told was that both of those seismic, landscape-shifting votes would usher us all into a new era of politics. It was nonsense then and, despite what a few people still claim, it's nonsense now.

If, as some would have us believe, those two referendums signalled a massive shift in the Irish mindset, how come last February's election still saw the ideologically indistinguishable two main parties hoover up more than 45 per cent of the seats and be far likelier than their left-leaning opponents to form the next government?

The answer is simple - we voted in 2015 and 2018 out of public interest. We voted in February on the basis of personal interest. In fact, you could argue that a lot of the people who cast their vote back then were doing so because they didn't want to be on the wrong side of history, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, the things which have a direct impact on our daily life, such as taxes and jobs, we will always, always vote for ourselves.

The day after the abortion referendum, I appeared on radio with a lecturer who proudly informed the listeners that the old political order was dead and we had become a more revolutionary society.

As the current and disgraceful impasse about forming a new government should remind us, that was simply wrong. We have become a more liberal society and for all its faults, that's a hell of a lot better than the Ireland of the 1980s.

But just because we have succumbed to common sense on social issues, it doesn't mean we aren't still an inherently conservative people who vote for the things we know - even we don't particularly like the politicians we're voting for.

It's a shame that we haven't had the space to properly mark those two anniversaries, but as for the idea that they heralded a new Irish political order? With the exception of the Shinner protest vote and the increase of support for the Greens, things are the same as they always were.