Grieving couples will no longer have to smuggle the remains of a cremated baby back to Ireland

Yes. Yes. Yes. Women, lovely women, the women of Ireland, have defeated those who hate us, fear us and wanted to keep us down. Overwhelmingly defeated them. The nightmare is over.

This campaign hasn’t been for three months. It has been for 35 years. The relief, the joy, is almost indescribable. So this is what liberation feels like. I am crying, I am laughing. I am so, so proud.

I was 26 in 1983 when feminists tried to stop the government from outrageously diminishing the humanity of women with the so-called anti-abortion amendment.

My granny paid for more than one trip to England in our family. On Friday night, as the magnificent news of the exit polls came through, my 24-year-old daughter, home to vote, hugged me.

Nine out of ten of her generation voted Yes. One of them tweeted that millennials in Ireland might never own property “but we’re sure as hell going to own our own bodies”. We tweeted a photo of us going in to vote, and Grannies 4 Equality liked it. The Father Ted jokes are great. The sun is shining.

Based on the exit polls, it looks like 72% of women and 66% of men voted Yes. People across all age groups, all classes. It has been a huge victory for humanity, for compassion, for empathy. We did not want any more children forced to bear children. Any more grieving couples having to smuggle the remains of their cremated baby back to Ireland. Any more women allowed to die because they were pregnant and doctors were too afraid to treat them. On a south Dublin wall, a mural of Savita Halappanavar’s beautiful lost face has candles around it now.

The anti-repeal side made out that women were marauding murderers. They tried to appropriate Irishness – they had a poster with our 1916 proclamation of independence on it, claiming that its signatories would want us to vote No.

It was incredibly moving to see all the people surging through Dublin airport, some of them having made huge, expensive journeys back from every part of the world because they knew how momentous it was to be Irish at this moment, and with the chance to shake off all that old nonsense.

The suffering caused by this amendment cannot be undone. Nor can the cruel history that led to it, the Magdalene Laundries, the mother and baby homes which tortured women and sold their babies. But this is the Yes that will enable Irish women to say No. No to all the other indignities and inequalities we still have to endure – the patriarchy has no idea what lies ahead now that we are actually going to own our own bodies. The North still has to be liberated – it has neither same-sex marriage nor abortion yet. But for now we are reeling. Ireland has said Yes. Passionately, lovingly, Yes.

ps. Thank you England for looking after us for all those lonely years when we got banished.

Susan McKay is an author, journalist and broadcaster from Derry in Northern Ireland, now living on the north Dublin coast