Good people — some of them writing for this paper — worked hard to convince the public that they did need them. The public, on Friday, responded with the wonderful clarity we sometimes miss in elections because of proportional representation. Nope, nope, they said.

Indeed, some didn’t even go that far. They spared themselves the whole thing by staying home. I found myself in a vast basketball court when I went to vote. The only person there, I was, other than the people in twos seated behind the tables, most of whom were having a peaceful desk lunch. 

When I asked the woman minding my area if it had been this slow all morning, she shied like Catherine Martin asked the confidence question and said it might get busier later. 

Not so much, it didn’t. Not because of a failure on the part of hardworking politicians who did their best to argue the public into caring, but because the whole thing was a pasta maker.

'An irritant to be shrugged at'

In January, I wrote that nobody cared about either of these referendums the way they did about the abortion or equal marriage referendums. 

Women who had lived with Dev’s “women in the home” clause were the generation who had broken out of the home and gone to work. For them, it had always been an irritant to be shrugged at rather than something to be formally replaced. 

It was ridiculous, but had never caused them a practical problem, so why would its replacement deliver them a benefit? Anyway, we kept being told that anything worthwhile, anything practical, emerging from either referendum would emerge from subsequent legislation and litigation, so why go through the referendum ritual in the first place?

But other, less obvious, factors were in play too.

Weirdly, this time, the Referendum Commission and the judge leading it became present and authoritative in a way that was not so obvious in the past, and it’s arguable this was a negative, particularly to the working-class districts which turned out in force to vote no/no. 

Middle-class people tend to defer to judges and like to hear from them as experts. But — as is increasingly evident in the US — that instinctive obsequiousness isn’t universal, and a growing cohort within the general public a) isn’t impressed by experts of any kind, and b) hates being lectured by them. So when politicians on the yes side quoted what the judge had said as if it were a clincher, it may in fact have been the opposite.

Hardly had the boxes been open and the tallies begun when people on social media and on radio were excusing the low turnout and the emerging no/no trend on the basis that confusion was the cause. 

No, it wasn’t. No, it really wasn’t. Consumers don’t fail to buy a pasta maker because they are confused as to its purpose. They know its purpose perfectly well. They just don’t want it. 

Failure to engage

Failure to engage on the part of the electorate is too readily explained away by commentators as having been generated by confusion, when it means something much less pejorative, much more realistic: They couldn’t be arsed. That’s the truth of these referendums, and, as far back as January, the evidence was obvious enough for me, in a column, to point to it.

When the public can’t be arsed, initial poll findings go south awfully quickly. That’s the first thing. 

Second thing is that they don’t talk about it. They just don’t, and you can’t make them. The most devoted eavesdropper in a bus or a train or a Luas or a Dart over the past month would have failed to pick up a single spontaneous conversation on either topic.

The avoidance of a post-factum blame game will be greatly helped by the fact that virtually all political parties — with the notable exception of Aontú — were for this, so those who care will quickly descend to abstruse argument about the Attorney General’s unshared advice.

The majority, on the other hand, will continue their worthwhile approach of not giving this a moment’s thought.