The 1995 divorce amendment only scraped through despite the main government and opposition parties supporting it. So its hardly surprisingly that anti-divorce lobbyists, and people opposed to the "liberal agenda" in general, have since claimed that the main parties ignore the views of half the electorate on such issues.
However, when parties opposed to the "liberal agenda" contested the following general election, they failed dismally. The candidates of Mrs Nora Bennis's National Party and Dr Gerard Casey's Christian Solidarity Party by and large lost their deposits. It seemed the vast majority of the electorate had accepted the reality of the liberal agenda and there was no further need to consider arguments against it.
Dana's vote should force a reconsideration of such an assumption. Of course, she was not elected, and her share of the vote, at almost 14 per cent, came nowhere near the 49 per cent claimed by the "family values" lobbyists as their constituency.
But the scale of her success should not be underestimated. She had no political profile, no party machine, no posters, no advertising campaign. Yet her share of the vote was greater than that of the Labour Party in the last election and several times that of either the Progressive Democrats or Democratic Left.
The reasons for this are complex. The presidential election was ideally suited to this kind of campaign. In general elections people are voting for packages on taxation, social welfare, education, and so on; issues which will affect their lives in a bread-and-butter way. They are also voting for a representative at the centre of power.
The Presidency, by contrast, is about symbols, image, values. People are voting for the reflection they wish to see of themselves, knowing this will have little effect on the day-to-day running of economic and political life. The vote for a "traditional values" candidate was always going to be greater in a presidential than a general election.
Dana obviously appealed to this constituency, with her evocation of the days when strong religious faith and family values sustained the Irish people through economic hardship and political adversity. The fact that those days included
enforced emigration, foreign adoptions of dubious legality and the abuse of children in orphanages, all sanctified by "traditional values", was never mentioned.
Until now this constituency has felt alienated from the media. At her party on the night of the count, the man who got up to thank her on behalf of her campaigners admitted: "We are afraid of the media." A world where religious teaching was bolstered by State enforcement offered poor preparation for debating those beliefs and teaching in a pluralist environment.
But Dana was reared in a society where she was a member of a religious minority, not a triumphalist majority, and she has spent the last seven years in an environment where there is permanent and lively debate about the place of religion in public life. She is also an accomplished media performer. For her, the camera is an ally, not an enemy. Confident before it, she garnered every vote available in this constituency.
However, she did not just appeal to those for whom an idealised past is preferable to a confusing and threatening present. While her campaigners were predominantly middle-aged and female, she also articulated the unease about the future felt by many younger people about the direction of Irish society.
Economic progress is good, she told voters, but not at the cost of marginalising some people and leaving children on the streets. We should be proud of our success worldwide, but cherish the traditional values and culture which made it possible.
Throughout the divorce debate it was clear that many people, who held no brief for conservative Catholicism, had looked at the future as represented by society in Britain and the US and found it unattractive.
Some had emigrated in the 1980s and returned when the Irish economy improved, often to raise families here. Others knew of it primarily through the media. Either way, a society where money-making, consumerism and personal gratification took precedence over social solidarity, family ties and the needs of children seemed less than attractive.
The Government campaign in the divorce referendum did little to reassure these people that a different society was envisaged here; one in which the demands of the workplace would not be allowed to ride rough-shod over the needs of family life; where public policy would seek to ease the stress of modern living, not add to it; and where economic progress would not lead to greater social division and deprivation. Voting for divorce could be presented as a slavish aping of our neighbours.
Dana appealed to those with such unease without asking people to support a return to the Ireland of the 1940s. She was an unthreatening representative of traditional values. She said she wanted equal respect for believers and non-believers, conservatives and liberals. She is herself a working mother, with a live-in nanny caring for her children for the past 15 years - not the model usually put forward by Catholic conservatism.
Throughout her campaign, Dana insisted she was not a politician, and she mined the deep vein of cynicism which exists about politicians. But she is now faced with a contradiction. To pursue the agenda she represented so well she must become one.
Her success also raises questions for politicians. There is a vacuum in political life when it comes to a vision for the future of Irish society beyond ever-expanding economic growth. Unless political leaders can address this, they are in for further surprises.