Oscar Wilde perambulated on to the stage after the final curtain of Lady Windermere's Fan: "Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself."
Henry James was there too on the opening night some 106 years ago, but hated the drama: far too frilly for him. Still, the play ran and ran, so much so that its success explains why a whole ward of Irish actors and impresarios - including Michael Colgan and Alan Stanford - couldn't vote in the Belfast and Amsterdam referendums: they are off fanning Lady Windermere in Charleston, South Carolina.
That accounts for perhaps 25 people in all. What about the rest? While the 56 per cent who did vote enjoy the exquisitely precious sensation of having helped make history, the 44 per cent who didn't are mute. Despite tsk, tsk sounds of disapproval from the moral high ground, the stay-away dissenters don't see it as a reddener, and aren't even bothering to make excuses.
"Yiz should be ashamed of yourselves," a neighbour of mine told one woman, who simply shrugged her shoulders in response. "Partition?" countered another. "Isn't that the album title of the new Jarvis Cocker?" Some people just don't want to make history.
The scale of this unheralded boycott is massive - more than 1.2 million people, bigger than the total electorate in Northern Ireland.
Imagine what would happen if every single member of the electorate in Munster and in Connacht had been excluded from the franchise? Ructions, if not widespread civil revolt. But even that doesn't add up - you can throw in the testy Border constituency of Cavan-Monaghan as well, and you still won't reach the total who decided to stay away.
It's a new kind of partition, ignored by the feel-good warmth of so-called consensus politics. Instead of we in the Republic claiming unfairly to define identity for nearly 1 million people living on the same island who don't agree with us, we are now in a strange new place where an even greater majority than that feel excluded by or from our instruments of State.
And unlike the UK, and much of EU Europe, Ireland lacks the kind of regional decision-making structure which allows consensus politics to be practised without squandering the democratic edge - you could argue that the structural condition of most Irish institutions has hardly moved on since Michael Collins accepted the keys to Dublin Castle.
Think of the referendum as a snapshot in time, a frozen moment where the future can look at our faces and guess what we were. History unfolded a powerful drama: we participated like a Greek chorus, feeding the big players enough confidence to do what needs must. But if today someone took an end-of-term photo of Irish identity, class of '98 and all that, it would in fact be more virtual than it would be reality, an image downloading onto a computer too immature to register it.
Sure, we voters would be the ones in technicolour in the front rows, but those stay-homes who chose to stage a boycott would be pictured in black and white, some fuzzily out-of-focus, some ducking down to escape the camera's command. We would all get to wear the merit badges; their badges would be about as fixed as a wilting summer daisy slipping out of a rusty safety pin.
I've never been entirely comfortable wearing a merit badge, not that I've exactly been besieged with attempts to pin one on me. But if ever I was tempted to engage in personation, the Belfast Agreement was it: the sweetest vote I ever cast, the best X yet. All of us performed beautifully, so intelligently that we too deserve a Wildesian pat on the back - upper back, naturally - for finally facing facts.
First-night highs are allowed. For a while. We need to experience the sense that school's out for summer, that we can take a break from those interminable history tests, perhaps even enter the age of post-terrorism, or hope to. But all this luvviedom about our thriving new democracy where consensus politics rule and everyone has a bite at the cherry and there is no democratic deficit is starting to act as if it were fact. It is not.
The boycott's terms aren't the subject of any opinion poll or Beckettian anthropopological survey, and probably won't be - easier to blame voter apathy, a shocking disregard of civic duty, or a sinister signal of a latent partitionist mindset lurking under the Republic's cheery consensual cheeks.
If Ireland was indeed a theatre, then the managers would be extremely worried about playing to half-filled houses. What makes this noticeably different from other poor turn-outs - although it was among the worst - is that the vote was about identity, in various ways: about putting people at the heart of political identity, or so we were assured.
Wilde argued in Lady Windermere's Fan that when an establishment becomes so wrapped up in itself it cannot recognise dissent, then society itself is in trouble.
If you read the boycott instead as an epidemic of blue flu, the emphasis shifts from blaming the stay-aways for their alarming irresponsibility to questioning the democratic outreach of the State itself. For some, the democratic process is fast becoming a greasy pole. And only four in seven are managing to cling on.
Take a 30-second test - when were the last local elections in Ireland? And anyway, did the results ever make any significant difference to anything much?
Mary Holland is on leave.