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Notes -
My feeling is that Ireland, like many countries, has been for some time in the "happy valley of liberalization" (of course it's only happy if you support liberalization), ie. the moment after the previous religious basis of conservatism has been broken and hollowed out (often quite dramatically in Irish case with the Catholic church scandals and the like), but before a new nationalist basis for conservatism has been constructed.
The anti-immigration riots and such are signs that there exists an inchoate feeling that can later be used to construct the new nationalist basis (sure, "Irish nationalism is different, it's progressive etc." - the same has been heard in many other countries just before a new right-wing nationalist movement has started to speed up), but the pieces that would make it are still finding each other.
There are politicians and movements sniffing the air and figuring out whether to catch the train, but they are still either too beholden to the old, obsolete model of religious conservatism, too afraid to lose whatever influence they have in the current system, too extreme and offputting, or simply too crazy. At some point some of the the religious conservatives will find a suitable synthesis that allows them to tacitly downgrade the most musty-seeming views, some of the ones still close to the system will detach themselves or be pushed out, some of the extremists will learn to smooth away the sharpest edges, and the crazies... well, they probably won't get better, they'll just be sidelined.
Once this happens, there might be new parties growing so fast that the liberals will feel like the rug is being pulled out under them; of course, nationalist conservatism will be different from religious conservatism, but it can still at least throw a spanner some way in the general process of liberalization.
I think it was simpler than that; we have a Citizens' Assembly where the Dáil (our parliament) puts questions to a selected number of the public for consideration as to what they'd like to happen. It's something along the lines of representative democracy and something like the ideal of prediction markets. A while back they asked the Citizens about gender equality.
The gay marriage and even abortion referenda had gone well, so the current government - being criticised for the housing crisis, matters such as the immigrant who attacked preschool kids, and the revelations about the money-wasting going on with our national broadcaster - wanted an easy feel-good result to make people happy and let the government bask in the resulting glow of "things are getting better".
Well, they mucked this one up big-time. Turns out people were not worried about sexist language in the Constitution, hence the low turn-out, and that the general public didn't trust the government weren't trying to weasel out of responsibility towards those in need by shoving off all caregiving onto 'the family'.
Just to clarify, I didn't really just comment on this referendum (there's probably indeed a large factor of the government just screwing up), or just Ireland in general, but - as is tradition in forums like this - just used the topic to pontificate on something else I've been thinking about recently.
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