People in the Republic of Ireland have voted overwhelmingly in favour of liberalising divorce laws, in a referendum held on Saturday.
The constitution currently states that spouses must be separated for four of the previous five years to divorce.
But that clause will now be removed, allowing the Oireachtas (Irish parliament) to decide a new separation period before divorce is allowed.
Divorce was legalised in Ireland in 1995.
The country voted in the 1995 referendum by a margin of just 50.3 per cent, BBC reports.
In Friday's poll, with two of 31 constituencies still to declare, voters backed a change to the law by 82.1 per cent to 17.9 per cent, according to results tallied by Irish broadcaster RTE.
Any change to the Irish constitution must be supported by a majority of voters in a referendum.
Prior to the vote on divorce laws on Friday, the government indicated that it believed a two-year separation was long enough.
Ireland has recently held constitutional referendums on other social issues - leading to the scrapping of the country's ban on abortion and the legalisation of same-sex marriage.
The main political parties in Ireland all supported the liberalisation of divorce laws. Opposition to the vote came from Catholic pressure groups such as the Iona Institute.
The Iona Institute's director, David Quinn, said he had no particular objection to the four-year waiting time for divorce being reduced to two years, but did not want to see divorce laws removed from the constitution completely.
According to Eurostat, the crude divorce rate in the Republic of Ireland is 0.6 per cent a year for every 1,000 people compared with 1.9 per cent for the UK and 3.2 per cent for the US.
