“Clearly we got it wrong,” Varadkar said. “While the old adage is that success has many fathers and failure is an orphan, I think when you lose by this kind of margin, there are a lot of people who got this wrong, and I am certainly one of them.”

The country’s 87-year-old constitution, which was drafted 15 years after Ireland won independence from Britain in 1922, at a time when the Catholic Church’s influence was dominant. Supporters viewed the proposed amendments as vital to ensuring that the constitution reflected the country’s more secular and liberal modern identity.

Nearly 3.5 million people were eligible to cast their ballot. However, turnout was mixed, reaching 50 per cent in some parts of the country, but below 30 per cent elsewhere, according to national broadcaster RTE.

In recent decades the Irish public has made a series of significant changes that rolled back socially conservative policies.

In 1995, Ireland voted to end its ban on divorce, with a later referendum in 2019 further liberalising divorce laws. In 2015, the country voted to legalise same-sex marriage, and, in 2018, a referendum was held that repealed the amendment that prohibited abortion.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald, whose party is the main opposition after winning the largest share of first-preference votes in the 2020 election, said the government had “come up short in terms of the caring wording” and there had been a lack of clarity.

McDonald said the people of Ireland had spoken “very, very definitively” but insisted her party were still in touch with the public.

“They didn’t consult with opposition or with other stakeholders. They didn’t collaborate, and they failed to convince,” she said.