Sinn Féin may take a while to adjust to their first bad electoral disappointment since Gerry Adams lost West Belfast all of 15 years ago, writes Fionnuala O Connor
The delight of pundits and political opponents at last week's SF performance will have stung much less, because it was so predictable, than the central message.
In much initial analysis, the republican showing was barely mentioned - they came way down the running order, among the also-rans.
At their ardfheis in March, with powersharing in Stormont all but sealed, party president Gerry Adams felt buoyant enough to envisage being in government "in both parts of this island". There was none of his habitual caution, no acknowledgement that prominence in the Dáil could be a long way off. It now looks as though Sinn Féin must face up to a future at best as Dáil makeweight, though that might bring influence and power of a kind.
After some fairly frank admissions of shock, though nobody used the word in public, the party's successful northern project gave itself a little consolation midweek by launching their "charter for unionist engagement" in Stormont's Long Gallery. Young advisers arrived with well-groomed republican ministers. Martin McGuinness played his amiable role in a script too glib to have any impact. Republicans had indeed hurt others but then everyone had hurt others, so everyone must take responsibility for mending the hurt.
The two main unionist parties stayed away, and the Protestant clerics and community activists who turned up seemed less than enthused. The declaration of intent in the charter to campaign for a new Irish constitution might have sounded less empty if the election had had a different outcome.
Republicanism needs to find a new horizon, since the old one seems to have receded. The grand wheeze that reinvented unification as northern and southern republican ministers working together in North-South institutions now sounds hopelessly lost. The problem is finding an achievable aim with any grandeur attached, even potential grandeur.
All is not lost, but a few bits of the much-vaunted project have taken hard knocks. It does not help that Mr Adams must have lost his gloss as all-competent and wise leader.
"The Irish nation does not stop at Dundalk," he said last month. The problem is that clearly the Republic either thinks it does, or does not think about it at all.
What price a united Ireland when the re-elected Taoiseach repeatedly uses the terms "Ireland" and "the country" - as he did utterly unconsciously during the campaign - to mean the 26-county state.
Sinn Féin genuinely seemed to believe that their adherence to the goal of unification was their prime attraction, which in conjunction with vaguely redistributive economics would make them a major southern party. Yet they have just been jolted by an election in which they were squeezed like the other small parties.
They gave it everything they had, in circumstances which could not have been more favourable. Hadn't they just made history in Belfast? The combination of auspicious timing, intensive campaigning, healthy finances, disciplined teamwork and, for the most part, records of hard constituency work still could not guarantee the seats of established TDs, much less usher in a shining new generation to make the impact the pioneers so clearly lacked.
If there was any credit going in last week's poll for putting Martin McGuinness at the top of a powersharing Executive with Ian Paisley, the Taoiseach got it, not Sinn Féin. If credit there was, it may have been for successfully taking Northern Ireland off the southern radar. But then of course Mr McGuinness was not a candidate last week, no more than Mr Adams.
The role of the Sinn Féin president in elections for which he does not stand has been a contradiction for some time: grandly ubiquitous on the campaign trail, actually detached. While the strongly northern collective leadership brought the bulk of the IRA into peacetime, there was a good argument for keeping him out of direct southern politics. In the new dispensation, what is Mr Adams for? His failure in that RTÉ debate must have stung. Moreover, he has his own heart-searching to do, and the party must join in. The sharp riposte by Michael McDowell will stick in memory banks, undimmed by the PD man's own defeat and departure. But the collective republican leadership shares responsibility for their leader's lack of preparation and the failure of their policies to attract enough support.
The dream of becoming a major party in the Dáil seems fanciful now rather than simply distant. Who knows what that realisation will do to Sinn Féin.
Yet if they can reassess their expectations they might well take heart. A slightly worse Fianna Fáil result, a slightly better Sinn Féin result, and seven or eight Sinn Féin TDs could yet be influential. The current wooing of the shrunken and decapitated PDs is the supreme lesson in realpolitik.