The fact that nearly 90% of 18-24 year olds voted repeal, although unsurprising, gives me chills.
In the US, most abortion polls show no age gap and some even show a slight reverse age gap. I wonder why Ireland is so different.
I'm not knowledgable enough to give a detailed explanation, so I'll just leave it at: Irish and American youth have very different relationships with religion and secularism.
People who are a lot more knowledgable than me can correct me but here's my opinion on why this is the case. Broadly the Catholic Church played an incredibly strong role in Irish civil life and remains a key thing that differentiates the Republic from the UK and especially the North. It was also basically the monolithic faith (80% of people there still identify as Catholic and that's fallen in recent years: don't have data on this but in the past I'd guess that number was a lot higher and other than a few Church of Ireland people it was pretty damn monolithic) and one that dominated so much of public life including a very prominent position in schools. In recent years there seems to have been massive changes in the way that Irish Society views the Church (perhaps akin to the Quiet Revolution in Quebec: there seems to be some parallels) and because of the monolithic nature of the Church there wasn't any real alternatives available and this perhaps resulted in a large number of people having a very negative view on Christianity generally: secularism is seen as being key in opening up public life in Ireland and making the country less... stifling for lack of a better word. However in America you don't have that situation: while Christianity is pretty damn monolithic its not one particular form of it but you have a million and also the Church isn't present everywhere you go which means that young Americans probably develop a healthier relationship with the Church generally - perhaps also the fact that you have a more open society when it comes to conversion means that young Americans are more likely to seek out an alternative Church than just throw the whole thing out entirely.
Another factor might be the total absence of evangelical christianity in any real sense: most young Christians in America go to Evangelical or non-traditional Churches and that isn't something that really exists in most of Europe. That has a two-pronged impact: first it weakens the importance of religion generally since younger people are either totally non-religious or have very weak attachment to the Church and don't really follow what they say and also it means that those faiths that have the most impact on public policy tend to be the Catholic Church - which tends to be the most politically active on issues like Abortion - and mild forms of Protestantism that generally are more concerned with issues like poverty and similar economic issues than they are about culture war socon stuff. Although none of them will ever outright support Abortion they tend to accept the current situation as the best possible and on other questions like LGBTQ rights you are seeing some pretty rapid change on acceptance of Queer people in the Church - look at the Church of Scotland for a good example of this - and that generally isn't the case for Evangelical Churches. The thing that sparked off the American culture wars was the significant growth of Evangelical Christianity in the 70s and 80s and that didn't really happen in Europe: and that is a massive and very important difference to keep in mind.
Not surprising. Catholics tend to be more liberal and open to change.
This is a very American-centric viewpoint that ignores the experiences of the rest of the world and especially Europe.
Broadly; the places in Europe that retain strongly anti-choice abortion legislation (Poland and Malta the big two; although this technically applies to Ireland until the 12 week bill passes and that would still be comparatively Conservative for Europe) are countries where the Catholic Church traditionally played (and the case of Poland still very much plays: don't know about Malta quite as much) an incredibly strong and key role in society.
To use Poland as a key example of this: its possibly the most Catholic nation in Europe (87.6% of Poles are Catholic according to the census and they have a much higher than average rate of regular Church attendance and its holding up - lots of reasons for this, I'd attribute one as being the fact that the Church was really the only independent Civil Society organisation in Communist times and other networks haven't really developed so the Church remains strong) and its policies on things like Abortion and LGBTQ issues are very right wing which seem to broadly be in line with popular opinion on said issues. Compare Poland to their neighbours who aren't Catholic and you'll find very different legislation on Abortion and perhaps even less regressive policies on LGBT people for example - not saying that the Czech Republic (although it was Catholic after the counter-reformation and Protestantism never really recovered it never was strongly so and there was plenty of opposition to the Catholic Church and 70% of people there are either atheists or non-religious) or similar places are paragons of progressivism or whatever but there is a clear trend for countries that have strongly socially-conservative legislation to broadly have strong Catholic churches.
To give a strong example that's close to home: Scotland in a country that traditionally has had a strong religious divide with two prominent faiths: the Church of Scotland (a presbyterian church: traditionally quite Conservative although its changed a hell of a lot recently) and Catholicism (many Catholics being descendants of Irish migrants). In recent years when matters such as Marriage Equality or currently the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act to liberalise laws on trans issues (broadly taking away the gatekeeping aspect of changing legal gender markers and introducing a gender-neutral option) typically the Church of Scotland is relatively silent (it officially opposed Marriage Equality although it didn't do so loudly and things are changing on that front) while the Catholic Church makes a lot of noise to try and stand against the proposed changes. Now that wasn't always the case and the Church of Scotland used to be pretty Conservative however Scotland as a whole has changed pretty quickly on issues like this (generally as secularism has risen: "No Religion" now beats both the Church of Scotland and Catholicism in the Census) and what seems to have happened is that the Church of Scotland has taken theological positions that are generally more tolerant and progressive than those of the Catholic Church in Scotland. Now this isn't the case necessarily for Protestantism generally (there are lots of small ex-CoS splitters like the Free Church of Scotland) but generally these churches are more skewed in the North of Scotland and aren't overly significant on a national level and we don't really have prominent evangelical churches so the Kirk is the most prominent and broadly does as good a job as you could expect from a major Church - although I grew up in a pretty strongly Protestant family so perhaps that's just latent sympathy with them, I don't know.
Northern Ireland stands out a little in that it is a place where the Catholic population appear more 'progressive' on issues like Abortion (although this isn't the case for active church-goers although in practice this doesn't influence their vote other than causing a few of the more dedicated to vote SDLP since very few Catholics would ever vote for the Unionist parties) and that's more because the type of protestantism that is present in Northern Ireland is a lot more radical and fundamentalist than typical European Protestantism usually is - perhaps you could compare it to America; to some extent. Why this is the case is again something for people who are experts to talk about - perhaps its because of the importance of Religion and Sectarian issues in the Province and that led to Protestants being theologically more reactionary; I don't know.
