Editorial: Sinn Fein's vote decline in Irish election shows there is no clamour for an all Ireland, north or south

​A key figure to bear in mind from the Irish general election is as follows.

​Sinn Fein won almost a quarter of the vote in the Republic of Ireland general election of almost five years ago. This time it won 19%, a drop of more than 5%.

The first thing to say that is that the 2020 result, while a very respectable showing and by far the best that the republican party had ever achieved south of the border, was in fact relatively modest.

After all, Sinn Fein have been talking about the inevitability of a border poll for decades, and their Irish republican predecessors also predicted the certain end of Northern Ireland, for example by the time of the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising.

So why is it that the sole party that is obsessed with the matter has only ever been able to muster a quarter of the vote?

Challenging the inevitability narrative is all the more important now that Sinn Fein’s vote has actually gone into reverse.

How does it explain this setback, if the people of the Republic are so determined to see a single, independent all-island state?

And, indeed, how do those unionists who have given weight to the notion that Sinn Fein and other organisations such as Ireland’s Future are right about the inevitable, coming end of Northern Ireland justify their own defeatist position?

Such unionists are few in number yet they have done great damage to unionist morale, and have given great succour to republicans – succour, indeed, that they are unable to get at the polls.

And here in Northern Ireland, for all the talk of inevitable unionist decline and an Alliance surge, unionists pulled ahead of nationalists again in the July election.

It is clear that there is no clamour on either side of the border for the shattering of the UK and a new all-island arrangement to replace the current constitutional arrangements.