Ben Lowry: This is far from the first election setback for Sinn Fein yet some unionists still seem to think the rise of republicans is inevitable

It is 17 years almost to the day since I joined the News Letter, a few weeks after a Dail election in the Republic.

(Click here to read Ben Lowry on why the TUV took a risk getting involved with a character like Nigel Farage)

I remember that 2007 Dail election well, because it had been followed closely in Northern Ireland due to an expectation that it would be Sinn Fein’s breakthrough – something the party failed to do. In fact, it lost a TD. The party had done very badly in all elections in which it stood after returning to such contests in the early 1980s. From then until the 1998 Belfast Agreement, Sinn Fein mostly got between 1% and 4% in elections south of the border. For example, in the 1997 general election in Ireland, a year before that power-sharing Stormont deal was signed, SF won a mere 2.5% of the vote.

Then, in the next such contest, five years later, its support leapt up to 6.5%. But while that was much more than it had achieved in elections over the preceding 20 years it was nonetheless a modest share of the ballots cast – with 94% of Irish voters giving their first preference to other parties.

And so, in 2007, SF was expecting to have ground-breaking result, not least because devolution had been restored (after years of suspension) when republicans struck a deal with Ian Paisley. But in fact the SF vote only edged up to 6.9%, and lost one of their five TDs.

It was then a long and slow journey for the party to its longed-for breakthough in the Republic, which came in 2020.

In 2011 SF got 9.9% of the vote: more than a decade after most other parties and the two governments had accepted the party in come in from the cold on both sides of the border, 90% of southern voters were still not endorsing it.

In the 2016 Dail election, SF edged up still further to 13.8%, and for the first time it got a hefty number of TDs: 23. But support fort the party still left it far short of being a contender for Taoiseach.

In February 2020, just before lockdown, it finally got the sort of result it wanted. Sinn Fein was the most popular party in terms of first preference votes cast – 24.7% compared to 22.2% for the traditional republican party Fianna Fail and 20.9% for Fine Gael.

It didn’t quite get the largest number of TDs, winning 37 compared to 38 for FF, but the party was now in prime position.Ever since then SF has been preparing for government in Dublin. FF and FG came together to keep them out in 2020, but with SF’s increased showing in polls after 2020, republicans were confident that they would get a Taoiseach next time.

In the picture above Sinn Fein is back to its confident self yesterday at an event in Belfast to showcase its Westminster candidates. But it must be rattled by the disastrous election results it has just had in the Republic.

There was no shortage of people in the media and elsewhere willing to help Sinn Fein by playing down what happened last weekend, for example pointing out that its vote share in the council elections was up by 2.3% on the last such contest in 2019 when it only got 9.5% of the vote. True, but its vote share in the European election over the same time period fell from 11.7% give years ago to 11.1% last week. And those two sets of election results in 2019, council and MEP, were seen to have been disastrous then, yet this time has been little different. The vote share they got in both contests is far below what they have been getting in opinion polls, of 20% or more.

The failure of Michelle Gildernew to get an MEP seat in the Irish European constituency that runs from Donegal, to the west of Northern Ireland, and then down through the midlands, south of the NI frontier, was all the more notable given that it had five seats. The party showed hubris in taking Ms Gildernew out of the Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency, assuming that it would have her as an Irish MEP and Pat Cullen as her replacement in the UK House of Commons.

Unionists should not get too pleased though. SF bounced back from its dismal showing in 2019 to get its best ever result in the Dail contest only nine months later, as it might do again next year. But at the same time unionists have been succumbing to understandable, but premature, defeatism. There is another Ireland’s Future event in Belfast today where there will be much talk of inevitable constitutional change. It is worth unionists remembering that SF has only once in 40 years come anywhere near getting the result it wanted, in 2020.

Now, like the DUP, it is suffering from moving from being a party of protest to one of government. It is alienating some of its base by making major compromises, and finding itself uncertain how to respond to public feeling on matters such as immigration.

SF support in NI is much stronger and reliable than in the Republic. But even then there is unpredictability as its poor 2019 Westminster result showed, when its vote plunged almost 7% on two years previously.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor