Irish voters soundly rejected a referendum effort to modernize the country's constitution with respect to the roles of family and women, delivering what Prime Minister Leo Varadkar characterized Saturday as "two wallops" to his government.
The pair of proposed constitutional amendments were put to voters on Friday, to coincide with International Women's Day.
But a Saturday tally revealed that both measures faced overwhelming opposition.
The first proposal, to expand the definition of family from a unit based on marriage to include other "durable relationships," was rejected by a vote of 67.7% to 32.3%, according to Reuters.
The second - which would have removed a constitutional reference to a mother's "duties in the home" and replaced it with a clause referring to the care family members provide each other - was rejected by an even sharper margin, 73.9% to 26.1%.
Varadkar, who had championed the vote as an opportunity to excise some "very old-fashioned, very sexist language about women," conceded Saturday that the voters had dealt his government "two wallops."
"It was our responsibility to convince a majority of people to vote yes, and we clearly failed to do so," Varadkar told reporters in Dublin.
While supporters of the measures argued that they would modernize the Irish constitution's stances toward women, opponents contended that the proposed new language was ill-defined and threatened to "cancel" the role of mothers.
