‘He’s good at unblocking pipes in washing machines though, and I thought he had a very sexy ass and deliciously muscular thighs, lying on your utility room floor trying to get at your . . . ah, stop . . . cock . . .’ Ella said innocently. She’d called over to Marie-Claire with a birthday present before she went to Toronto, to find her standing beside her next-door neighbour, whose head was stuck in a press under a sink, effecting an emergency shutdown of Marie-Claire’s water flow.

‘Give over,’ grinned Marie-Claire. ‘Not going to happen.’

‘Indeed!’ Ella grinned back. ‘Here’s the girls.’ She smiled at the sight of her teenage daughters barrelling through the door. ‘They’re in a good mood today,’ she whispered. ‘We must be thankful for small mercies. And thankful too that they’ll never have to worry about being denied necessary medical treatment in a maternity hospital in Ireland. They’ll never have to go through what I went through.’

Marie-Claire squeezed her best friend’s hand in silent support, before she was enveloped in hugs and kisses from her ‘posh besties’, as she called them, warming the cockles of her heart.

‘Isn’t it a great day for Irish women, Marie-Claire?’ Julie, her younger godchild, said fervently, scooting in beside her.

‘Empowering, sweetie. A day when we came into our own, at last,’ Marie-Claire agreed.

‘History in the making and we were part of it. Like the civil marriage referendum,’ Jada remarked proudly.

‘It’s a far different country to what your mother and I grew up in, for sure—’

‘You sound like our parents,’ grinned Ella.

‘And God knows they had to put up with so much we didn’t have to. When my mum was training to be a teacher in a college run by nuns, she’d to kneel down and have her dress measured to see if it was long enough to go out. If it didn’t touch the floor, she had to change.’

‘OMG!’ squealed the teenagers.

‘That’s like from the ark!’

‘Wow! Like, unbelievable.’

‘You certainly wouldn’t have been getting piercings, tattoos and the like, if you were growing up in our day!’ Ella pointed out, and laughed when Julie did a dramatic eye-roll.

They ate their meal, and for once the girls put their phones away and lively chat and banter went to and fro across the table. Later they mingled with the throngs of people gathered together to affirm the result of the referendum, which had been divisive and bitterly fought.

There was no air of triumphalism, no wild celebration. What struck Marie-Claire most was the undercurrent of relief that permeated the crowds of women, and men who had fought the battle for sisters, wives and daughters, and the sense of a coming of age in dealing with a problem that had been hived off to other countries for generations.