Hardline conservatism has been vanquished as never before, Fintan O'Toole writes, and the kulturkampf of the right has lost its ability to rouse the mass of the electorate on abortion
For all the ambiguities which must complicate any interpretation of yesterday's knife-edge vote, at least one thing is clear. For the first time on a moral issue, the combined forces of Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church have been beaten. Never before has the electorate refused to yield before the full force of Rome and the Republican Party, to the crozier and the ministerial Merc.
In the first abortion and divorce referendums of the 1980s, the party and the pulpit were closely allied and swept all before them. In the 1992 referendum on the substantive abortion issue, Fianna Fáil failed to rally the support of the bishops and lost. In the second divorce referendum, the church went into battle without Fianna Fáil at its side and was just about defeated.
This time, however, the unity of church and party was fully restored. There were no dissenting voices from within the church leadership or within Fianna Fáil.
The battered moderates within the Catholic leadership kept quiet. The so-called liberals within Fianna Fáil melted away like snow in the sun. The magic formula was in full working order.
And it failed.
While the detailed meaning of the referendum result is completely fragmented, this is the big picture. Just how big becomes obvious when we remember that what characterised Irish identity for perhaps the last 200 years was the fusion of politics and religion.
This fusion is what has made sectarianism so potent. It is what made it possible for the church to control the framework of politics in independent Ireland. It created those crushing victories for conservatism in the 1980s.
What we are now seeing is that, even when it is recreated in its most powerful form, it has lost its grip. The old monolith can no longer stand up to the new diversity of opinion. The authority of leaders is waning.
The three political figures most closely identified with the proposal - the Taoiseach, the Minister for Health and the Attorney General - each failed by a large margin to win his own constituency. Equally, the pre-eminent leader of Catholic opinion, Cardinal Connell, was overwhelmingly rebuffed in his own Dublin diocese.
Perhaps more worryingly for conservatives, the old monolith has lost its passion.
The most significant detail in all the array of voting statistics is the one which actually determined the overall result: the turnout was higher in the areas which voted No (33 per cent in Donegal North-East, for example, compared to 47 per cent in the Dublin constituencies).
It is almost a mathematical rule, indeed, that the higher the Yes vote in the constituency, the lower the turnout.
What this suggests is that abortion, which was until recently the great emotive cause of conservative Ireland, has simply lost its ability to rally the troops. Whereas in the past conservatives were full of energy and fervour while liberals tended to live up to their "wishy-washy" stereotype, the roles are now reversed.
The urban No voters were simply more fired up than their conservative rural counterparts.
Or, to put it another way, the certainties on which conservative morality is founded have been replaced by ambiguities.
What we are seeing is the birth of a kind of soft conservatism which may well coincide with the watering down of religious practice in a secularising society.
While some of those within the mainstream anti-abortion movement may take comfort in the argument that they would have won if the Government proposal had brought the hardline anti-abortionists on board, this argument is unconvincing.
The reality is that a more conservative proposal, outlawing abortion from the moment of conception, would almost certainly have been defeated by a much larger margin. Crusading has become a minority taste.
More broadly, and even more depressingly for conservatives, there is overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of the population simply doesn't want to play the old game of culture wars any more.
Easily the biggest category of the electorate is that which couldn't be bothered to express an opinion on the proposal. It doesn't believe that changing the Constitution changes behaviour. It may not like abortion very much, but it's not too pushed either way. It is resigned to the way we are, as a fairly typical western European society, and can't see much to get outraged about.
The collapse of certainty on the issue over the last 20 years is remarkable. In 1981, when the campaign for an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution was getting under way, the European Value Systems Study found an extraordinary level of consensus on abortion in Ireland.
On a scale of one to 10, with one meaning that abortion is never justified and 10 that it is always justified, Irish opinion as a whole ranked at 1.7.
YESTERDAY'S results confirm the complete disintegration of that near-consensus that abortion is never justified. It is now clear that the moral question that most people ask themselves is about the range of circumstances in which abortion is permissible.
Almost no one outside the very small Youth Defence tendency now believes that the right answer is "never".
The argument for the future is about a range of options, from life-saving operations at one end of the scale to a woman's right to choose at the other.
A part of this move from rigid certainty to open-minded ambiguity is the gradual relaxation of the tensions between urban and rural Ireland.
This may seem an odd point to make in the context of a vote which was overwhelmingly shaped by that very division. But a closer look at the individual results suggest that while the urban/rural is still very real, it is slowly being washed away.
The suburbanisation of the east coast, for example, is reflected in the fact that Kildare, Louth, Meath, Wicklow and Wexford all voted No or very narrowly Yes.
Equally, it should not be forgotten that almost every constituency has within it a minority of at least one-third which went against whatever the local grain happened to be. There is, in other words, no longer any workable stereotype of what a rural or an urban Irish person is. The erosion of differences in lifestyle and cultural influence is being reflected in the gradual evolution of a patchwork of opinions.
This suggests that it is not just people's views that are changing, but the way opinions are formed in the first place. The desire to conform, to go along with the majority view in your own community, is on the wane.
The right to hold and express an individual view is increasingly accepted. The Catholic culture of consensus is giving way to a Protestant culture of individual belief.
What all of this means, quite simply, is that the conservative counter-revolution is over.
Abortion, let us remember, was the battleground that the conservatives themselves chose for their last stand. They identified it as the symbolic issue on which Ireland would opt out of the liberal, secular trend of the developed world.
They hoped that a victory in this battle would ultimately turn the tide.
Up until yesterday it was still possible to believe that this might happen.
The meaning of the defeat of the 1992 abortion referendum was utterly ambiguous.
The result of the second divorce referendum - on an issue where liberals were playing on home ground - was, after all, a moral victory for the conservative side, which came within a whisker of victory even without significant political or media support.
Now there is no way back for the once-invincible fusion of nationalism and Catholicism.
The defeat for Fianna Fáil and the church, indeed, is far greater than the numerical margin of the result. Fianna Fáil will not try to roll back the X case judgment a third time.
Any change in the abortion laws will, however gently, be in the direction of recognising circumstances in which an abortion is permissible.
What other issue does the conservative movement have to campaign on?
It has completely given up the fight on contraception.
It knows that there is no hope of banning divorce again.
On abortion, it has lost not just the vote but the power to generate the zealotry and emotionalism that frightens politicians into line.
Once made, however hesitantly, the choice between the moral complexity of the real world and the absolute certainty of abstract principle cannot be unmade.
If yesterday's vote tells us anything about ourselves, it is that we are no longer ashamed of feeling uncertain and even confused about issues that do not lend themselves to absolute truths.
We have decided, in a line from Brian Friel's play Translations, that "confusion is not an ignoble condition".
Fintan O'Toole is an Irish Times columnist and the paper's chief theatre critic