The opinion polls may suggest an electorate at ease with the status quo. The economic statistics may imply contentment. But anybody who pays close attention to the public mood cannot have been too surprised at the defeat of the Nice Treaty proposal.
The cynicism evident in the low turnout, and the anti-establishment anger manifest in the vote itself, have been around for quite a while. Without a countervailing vision being articulated by the Government, they were bound to come out some time.
The illusion of consensus in Irish society has been sustained only by the fact that those who are unhappy seldom agree on the nature of their discontent. The dissenters occupy very different and often passionately opposed camps.
There is the largely disenfranchised Catholic right, which has shown again and again that it can mobilise at least 20 per cent of the electorate.
There's the old left which has been somewhat isolated in party political terms since the 1980s Workers' Party vote fragmented and was only partly absorbed by Labour.
There's the old nationalist culture which has been re-animated by Sinn Fein.
And there's the swathe of activist groups influenced by the environmental and anti-globalisation movements.
Beyond these specific constituencies, however, there is a big, largely unmapped, terrain of resentment, suspicion and anger. Those who occupy it are more cynical than apathetic.
They have been disillusioned by the endless tales of corruption in politics. They are haunted by a vague but powerful feeling that their Republic has been stolen from them, that the State is no longer theirs.
Now and then, something crystallises this resentment and gives it a concrete shape.
The abortive appointment of Hugh O'Flaherty to the European Investment Bank last year was one such event. The Nice referendum, as it turned out, was another.
The beauty of the Nice Treaty is that it has something for all of these groups to dislike.
For the Catholic right, it is a further step in the advance of a godless European superstate. For the old left and the Greens, it formalises the moves towards a common defence and security policy that has long been under way. For nationalists, it is a further dilution of national sovereignty.
Best of all, for the broad constituency of anti-establishment resentment, it has the inestimable advantage of being supported by virtually the entire establishment: the four big political parties, the trade unions, the employers, even the bishops. The chance to bloody all their noses with a single swipe was far too good to miss.
All of this should have been easy to anticipate. A strategy to counteract it would have included a long, slow process of explication and the kind of national debate on Ireland and Europe that Bertie Ahern called for last year but did nothing to initiate. The mind-numbing detail of the treaty, after all, makes real sense only in the context of a bigger picture.
Yet while virtually every government has tried to set out a grand vision for the EU, ours simply hasn't bothered. All we got instead was some mean-spirited sniping from the long grass.
Late last year, Mary Harney alleged that the development of the EU might lead to "a situation in Ireland where we have to import the kind of job-destroying policies which are keeping millions of people on the dole right across continental Europe".
In a speech welcomed by Bertie Ahern, Sile de Valera complained that "directives and regulations agreed in Brussels can often seriously impinge on our identity, culture and traditions" and warned that, with EU enlargement, "the emphasis will shift towards the east".
In the row over the EU Commission's formal reprimand of Charlie McCreevy's budget, the Minister for Finance accused those nasty, impoverished Germans, French and Swedes of being jealous of our economic success. Was this the grand plan for firing up pro-EU sentiment?
The Taoiseach paid the price yesterday both for this Euro sceptic self-indulgence and for breaking his 1997 promise to hold a referendum on Ireland's entry to the NATO-led Partnership for Peace (PfP). Wriggling out of the debate on the current meaning of Irish neutrality at that time might have seemed like a cute stroke. All it did, however, was to shift that debate into the much less appropriate context of the Nice Treaty.
However much pro-Nice campaigners might insist that the treaty has no real implications for Irish neutrality, avoiding the issue was never going to be enough to assuage the genuine doubts.
The silver lining, however, is that surely we must now have the real debate on the future of the EU that has hitherto been confined to the elite. Having stumbled into the spotlight and inadvertently placed ourselves at the centre of a continental dilemma, we suddenly have no choice but to take this stuff seriously. Finding the EU boring is no longer an option.
The forum on Europe that the Labour Party has proposed - along the lines of the New Ireland Forum - should be established. It should be held in public and broadcast on television. No plans for a new referendum should be discussed until it has reported.
More importantly, though, the political establishment has to consider why the public trusts it so little that it simply refuses to believe its reassurances. Promising a referendum on PfP and not delivering has consequences. Throwing Eurosceptic shapes one month and then saying how wonderful the EU is the next has consequences. Those consequences may have started with the Nice Treaty referendum, but they won't end there.
When it comes to the wages of smugness, yesterday was only a downpayment.