DUBLIN — Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, according to final results announced Saturday, sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.

The surprising landslide cemented the nation’s liberal shift at a time when right-wing populism is on the rise in Europe and the Trump administration is imposing curbs on abortion rights in the United States.

In the past three years alone, Ireland has installed a gay man as prime minister and has voted in another referendum to allow same-sex marriage.

But this was a particularly wrenching issue for Irish voters, even for supporters of the measure. And it was not clear until the end that the momentum toward socially liberal policies would be powerful enough to sweep away the deeply ingrained opposition to abortion.

“What we have seen today really is a culmination of a quiet revolution that’s been taking place in Ireland for the past 10 or 20 years,’’ Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said at a counting center in Dublin.

“This has been a great exercise in democracy,’’ Varadkar said, “and the people have spoken and the people have said: We want a modern constitution for a modern country, and that we trust women and that we respect them to make the right decisions and the right choices about their own health care.’’

He said his government will move quickly in Parliament to pass a new law to govern abortions.

Election officials said more than 1.4 million voters, or 66 percent of those who cast valid ballots, favored repealing the Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution while roughly 724,000 wanted to keep the abortion ban in place.

The deputy chairwoman of one of Ireland’s biggest antiabortion groups, Cora Sherlock, called it a “sad day for Ireland’’ and rejected the argument that abortion was primarily a health care issue.

The vote repeals the Eighth Amendment, a 1983 measure that conferred equal rights on the fetus and the mother and banned abortion under almost all circumstances.

Before the referendum, the government had pledged to pass legislation by the end of the year to allow unrestricted terminations up to 12 weeks if the amendment was set aside.

The outcome signaled the end of an era in which thousands of women each year had been forced either to travel abroad or to buy pills illegally online to terminate their pregnancies, risking a 14-year jail sentence.

The government has said that general practitioners — doctors who are the first port of call for patients — will be asked to provide abortions, although they will still be allowed to conscientiously object to terminations at their clinics.

The vote “now means I can do my job without the fear of going to jail,’’ said Grainne McDermott, a doctor who works in intensive care in a Dublin hospital.

McDermott described one case in which a mother whose life was in danger first had to follow a complex procedure involving hospital lawyers and other medical experts before obtaining abortion pills.

“This was the absolute reality,’’ she said. “I used to think: This cannot go on.’’

The vote followed months of soul-searching in a country where the legacy of the Catholic Church remains powerful. It was the latest, and harshest, in a string of rejections of the church’s authority in recent years.

The church lost much of its credibility in the wake of scandals involving pedophile priests and thousands of unwed mothers who were placed into servitude in so-called Magdalene laundries or mental asylums as recently as the mid-1990s.

The church was, in fact, largely absent from the referendum campaign. Antiabortion campaigners actively discouraged its participation, preferring to emphasize moral values and human rights rather than religion, possibly to avoid being tarnished by the church-related scandals.

During the campaign, the Association of Catholic Priests urged its members not to preach politics from the pulpit. The guidance came after some priests had threatened their congregations that they would not be able to receive Communion if they voted “yes,’’ according to parishioners.

“This is devastating for the Roman Catholic hierarchy,’’ said Gail McElroy, professor of politics at Trinity College Dublin. “It is the final nail in the coffin for them. They’re no longer the pillar of society, and their hopes of reestablishing themselves are gone.’’

The result caught most observers and voters off guard. In the final weeks leading up to the referendum, observers and pollsters had said that the gap between “yes’’ and “no’’ voters had narrowed significantly.

Advocates for legalizing abortion had campaigned heavily on so-called hard cases faced by women, such as rape or fetal abnormalities.

For many opponents, abortion amounts to murder, while others worry Ireland is losing its identity as a Catholic country.

But for supporters of legalizing abortion, the result was an affirmation of their acceptance by society. Ireland “is taking the proper steps to separate church and state and to move forward as a more progressive country,’’ said Conor Flynn, a 22-year-old student.

Una Mullally, a prominent campaigner for abortion rights, said the issue was more than just a medical procedure, but was about how women have been oppressed. “All of us have underestimated our country,’’ she said.