Polls just 3 weeks showed 92% Irish approval for the EU, with those aged 18-24 a full 97 per cent pro-EU.
How did the Irish keep their identity, their "Irish exceptionalism" through 350 years of Cromwell and his successors despising them, starving them and stomping them into the dirt, only to succumb to the EU crooning, "You'd be cooler if you were just like us, you know"?
That poll was from European Movement Ireland, and is as believable as the polls that predicted an 87-93 percent chance of a Hillary landslide in 2016.
I’ve been reading reports of hundreds of thousands of Irish “expats” who went to influence the referendum, too. Not unlikely that not all of them were Irish, to boot.
Cromwell was the exception to the rule. Most Irish have forgotten that their vote actually counted in Westminster and they at one time steered the course of the British Empire in that parliament. They had the kind of representation that the American colonists sought but George III never gave (and that Ireland would never, ever have in the EU). Before the perception of draconian justice meted out to the 1916 rebels (many of whom were communists and deserved worse IMHO), the Irish were seeking home rule, i.e. something like the dominion status of Canada.