Party set for 15 seats in the Dáil after best performance in modern electoral history
Gerry Adams easily won his West Belfast Westminster seat (which he has never taken up in the House of Commons) in the general election. Five out of the six Northern Ireland assembly seats in west Belfast are held by Sinn Féin.
Adams need hardly have worried that, when he left the west of the city behind, he was risking Sinn Féin's hegemony there. So some questioned the wisdom of his decision to move to Louth in the Irish Republic, given that it is the area where one of the "disappeared", Jean McConville, was buried in secret by the IRA.
Yet despite a campaign against him by some of McConville's family, Adams still managed to secure more than 15,000 first preference votes in his new constituency. Nationally, his party has put in its best performance in modern electoral history south of the border, and could end up with 15 seats.
They will not, however, serve in government in Dublin, preferring instead to lie in wait on the opposition benches to attack the Irish Labour party if it enters coalition with Fine Gael.
Adams has managed to push Sinn Féin on to a new plateau from which it hopes to climb above the established parties of Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fáil. Its prospects depend now on how those first two parties manage the fiscal and economic crisis in which the Republic is still mired.
The final paradox of this election is that Sinn Féin's success – most of it due to the historic decline in Fianna Fáil's support – is principally based on economic disillusionment.
Sinn Féin is the most stridently nationalist in the new Dáil and constantly pushes its all-Ireland agenda. And yet throughout this three-week election campaign, virtually no one, either politician or voter, mentioned the question of Northern Ireland and the fact that it remains part of the UK.