Either it matters what it says in the Constitution or it does not. The past six weeks have been characterised by a public debate which has assumed it matters very much, that the words of our Constitution should mean what they say and not say anything we do not want them to mean.
Friday's vote seems to indicate the majority of us believe such precision is necessary and desirable. And so we have put an end to the so-called "territorial claim". We have done this, we believe, in the interests of promoting peace and harmony with our unionist neighbours.
Few could argue with such noble ambitions - thus the massive Yes vote, far exceeding any estimate of the proportion of people in the Republic who are hostile or indifferent to the concept of national unity. If what we have done would ensure peace on the island, this would be greatly to be celebrated. But, although I too voted Yes on Friday, I don't believe it is that simple.
It is not that I do not believe that peace is not now imminent. I do. I have believed this for several years, and have said so in this column, often in the face of poisonous derision and abuse from what might loosely be called my colleagues. What I do not believe is that what we, in this Republic, did on Friday last will alone do much to move this island towards peace, in the simplistic way peddled by our politicians and purchased by the voting public.
I hope it will move us closer to unity, the only true route to peace. This, I believe, was not the intention of our politicians or of the generality of the electorate. What they, or most of them, intended was that this gesture of ours would say to unionists that we no longer cared enough about a united Ireland to be bothered arguing with them, and would therefore no longer pose any threat to their supremacy. Such is the indifference of the Southern public to the North and to Irish nationalism, that this is regarded as a virtuous position.
But there is also, in this equation, another important element - now disregarded - namely the historic provenance of the Irish nation, which derives its legitimacy from across the generations and centuries of struggle for independence. Nobody alive on this island has any right to abandon this project.
What we have done can only be right if it is intended as a tactical manoeuvre to enable Northern nationalists gain a foothold on power in the six counties. The test for the Republic's population will be whether we, in the absence of republican violence to further the aim of unity, take our cue to reassert the claim to self-determination as part of a united nationalist family, or whether we lapse into the crude unionist interpretation of our gesture and decide the North is even less of our business than before.
I continue to nurture hopes of the former, but greatly fear the latter is more in keeping with the emerging sensibility in the Republic, at least at a public, official level.
On Saturday, even as the votes were being counted, some leading Southern politicians were to be heard on the media congratulating themselves on having anticipated this alleged abandonment of national aspirations. Similarly, it appears, we must continue to endure the prating of those who even yet would have us believe the problem in the North has to do with a denial of the legitimacy of the unionist tradition.
The wellspring of these attitudes is the continuing belief that what we are dealing with in armed republicanism is terrorism pure and simple. Although the clear implication of the recent peace process was that its purpose was to put an end to war, this interpretation is entertained in the Republic - by our leaders as much as anyone else - only for the purposes of keeping the Provisionals sweet.
Deeper down, most of those negotiating with Sinn Fein believe what they have engaged in is the dismantling of a terrorist situation. Otherwise we would not have witnessed the recent public furore about the appearance of the Balcombe Street Four at the Sinn Fein Ardfheis.
Their reception implied these men were prisoners of war, who had endured much in the cause of their people and were about to be released as part of a general settlement. The subtext of the outrage which followed was that they were straightforward terrorists. We in the Republic seem to want, simultaneously, a settlement and the preservation of our narrow moral focus on the events of the past three decades. We cannot have it both ways.
Nor can we any longer adopt our now traditional ostrich posture on the issues affecting the nationalist people of the six counties. We have now surrendered one central element in the cultural mechanism which kept the door to unity, however slightly, ajar. If we carry through the logic of what some of our leaders would have as our true motive for doing this - that is weariness with the entire "National Question" - there is a danger we will begin to regard the North as an even more separate place.
This would be fatal, not just to Northern nationalists, but even more so for the normalised reality we have created for ourselves. Grateful as we should be for Tony Blair's vision and radicalism, we should not allow our gratitude to prevent us seeing through his pontificating about violence in Ireland as though it were nothing to do with him or the country he leads.
It comes down, as I say, to how seriously we take the words of our Constitution. We have dispensed with the parts which noted the extent of the national territory and those which looked forward to its reintegration. But there remains the commitment, in the preamble to Bunreacht na hEireann, to pursue the unity of our country in the interests of the common good.
Article 1 also remains: "The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right to choose its own form of government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions."
Unless we take the words of this injunction at least as seriously as we have allowed ourselves to take those we have now obliterated, any peace we create will be a fragile entity.