There exists a myth, promoted mainly by self-styled liberals, that changes in popular attitudes to social issues have mainly to do with the lessening of certain institutional influences on Irish life.
Thus, the recent referendum result is evidence of the waning capacity of Fianna Fβil and/or the Catholic Church to influence how people vote.
This logic discounts the possibility that people reject things like abortion or divorce because they have different values or beliefs, holding that the explanation for such recalcitrance must be terror of crozier or party whip.
That people may have voted on the basis of principle, conviction and reflection is not, apparently, to be entertained. In the minds of many "liberals", the recent great debates on these issues have not been genuine controversies, but battles to wrest a gullible and terrorised electorate from the grip of malign forces.
Thus, the recent result is just another staging post on the path to public enlightenment.
When you examine the record of voting patterns in the various referendums, a different picture suggests itself. This is suggestive not of the drift of a previously cowed electorate from the tyranny of imposed thought to freedom of conscience and expression, but of the tentative and even tortured journey of a conscientious electorate from the working assumptions of a different age to an often reluctant compromise with the present.
It has been alleged that the recent referendum was the first time the Irish electorate "defied" both church and party in such a poll. But, in the 1983 abortion referendum, although the incumbent Taoiseach and liberal guru, Dr Garret FitzGerald, urged people to vote against the amendment, and Fianna Fβil had no formal stance, the amendment was carried by two to one.
This is hardly suggestive of an electorate at the bidding of political parties.
Similarly, the notion that, at any time since about 1970, the Irish public was trooping sheep-like into churches to be told by the clergy what to think or do is comical to anyone who has not spent recent decades with his nose stuck in a book.
Party and church are elements of the glue which provided the past cohesion of Irish society, but they are no more important than a raft of other factors, including community solidarity, kinship, neighbourliness, tribal loyalty and a deep-set philosophical realism which accepts that life is mostly far from perfect.
In focusing their undisguisedly triumphalist attentions on the supposed breaking-away from alleged tyrannies, liberals divert attention from the often painful and reluctant tussle that is occurring in relation to the values being discarded, and prevent discussion of the wisdom of this.
A typically dishonest trick has been to present the conservative-liberal debates as a re-enactment of the alleged urban-rural divide. This analysis suggested that increasing urbanisation would of itself ensure a disengagement from traditionalism, assuming, again, that a refusal to share the great liberal certainties was evidence of backwardness, terror or stupidity.
It assumed, too, that paved streets and joined-up housing provided a means of dispelling ignorance and superstition. Thus, the logic goes, the journey under way, though slow and difficult, is virtuous and noble, and will one day be celebrated as an unambiguous liberation.
Come, let us take you to the Promised Land, for you have nothing to lose but your ignorance and gullibility.
If you conduct an even cursory comparison between the results of the vote in the recent referendum and that held on the same issue in 1983, the most striking aspect is not the extent to which Irish society has emerged from bog-ignorance, but rather the drift that has occurred in the longest-established urban area in the State.
The notion that Ireland was previously split on abortion on a purely urban-rural basis is a fallacy. Some of the strongest pro-amendment votes in 1983 were returned in the inner city and north side of Dublin.
And most of these constituencies also voted against divorce in 1986.
On both occasions there was a marked contrast in the voting patterns between the constituencies of the north and those of the generally more middle-class and affluent south city and county.
What is most striking about the outcome of this month's vote is that this north-south divide in Dublin has almost disappeared. All the Dublin constituencies voted No, and the north- and inner city show signs of convergence with the south.
So the real issue is why the heart of Dublin is now becoming less like the rest of Ireland and more like Dublin 4. This cannot, surely, be a drift from rural to urban values, and it is unclear what it has to do with the influence of institutional Catholicism.
And, having identified what is going on in Dublin, we might then turn our attention back to the rest of the country, and ask ourselves why it is that other areas, including - yes - some of the more remote outposts of rural Ireland, are moving more slowly in the same direction.
Such an exercise, I believe, might lead us to shift our focus on to the disintegration of the value systems which have underpinned Irish communities in both city and country until now, and thus provide considerably fewer grounds for triumphalism.
jwaters@irish-times.ie