The family and care referendums of 2024 may in time occupy little more than a footnote in the history of a year that promises far more politically significant electoral contests. The rejection of both proposed amendments, on the definition of the family and the role of carers, has neither the shock value nor the political import of the No votes on the Nice and Lisbon Treaties in the 2000s. It is unlikely to galvanise activists in the way that the rejection of the 1986 divorce referendum did. More likely, yesterday’s results will sit in our memory somewhere closer to the...