Elaine Loughlin: Without a direct road map, voters found it difficult to back Sinn Féin's unclear alternative

It meant that Micheál Martin and Simon Harris had effectively sewn up the outcome before a vote was cast.

While 60% of voters gave their number one vote to a candidate who does not belong to the two civil war parties, the lack of a real alternative means that a Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael coalition with the addition of another party or Independents is the only option.

Voters, while unpredictable, are still human and by and large are creatures of habit. Asking the electorate to embrace radical change is a tall order, it goes against an engrained resistance to the unfamiliar, a desire to protect us from adversity or danger. The same is true in politics.

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Asking voters to take an almost blind leap into backing Sinn Féin, without providing a full and detailed blueprint of what that alternative would look like, was a vital flaw in the party’s strategy.

Voters may have been confident that Sinn Féin housing spokesperson Éoin Ó Broin could bring about real change in tackling the homeless crisis, but never fully believed that he would actually be appointed a minister to allow him enact his policies for housing delivery.

When members, including McDonald, were asked about who they might do a deal with after the poll, the standard response repeated was that Sinn Féin was seeking to win as many seats as possible to lead a government of change.

McDonald only moved to encourage voters to back her party and then stay left in their voting in the dying hours of the campaign. It felt a little like a last-minute attempt to grasp transfers from the likes of the Social Democrats and Labour, parties that were clearly showing signs of growth, which has now been borne out as the votes are counted and seats filled.

It has to be acknowledged that People Before Profit-Solidarity was the only grouping on the left that had strongly called for a left alliance when the campaign kicked off. The problem for PBP is its counterparts on the left don’t really see the group as serious when it comes to government formation.

Arriving into the RDS count centre over the weekend, the Sinn Féin leader stressed that she doesn’t want to see another term with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael at the helm, but could not really provide a plan for preventing this.

“We intend when the votes are counted and when we know the lie of the land, we will be talking to people about the possibilities of government,” she said.

I do not want to see another five years of the kind of chaos, the kind of disregard that we have seen under Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, I think that is a bad outcome for our society.

“We have received a result that many people only a few weeks ago would have thought was impossible.”

While it is true that expectations in relation to the party had been downgraded significantly to reflect a slow decline in support from 37% just two years ago to around 19% in the pre-election polls, Sinn Féin has not received the same rush of support as in 2020.

The party has seen its vote share plummet significantly from 24.5% at the last election, when it was widely acknowledged that the party did not field enough candidates to meet demand, to 19% in Friday’s poll.

McDonald may still be a poll-topper in her constituency, but her popularity has declined.

In 2020, she received 11,223 first preference votes, that number fell to 6,389 in Friday’s poll. The party did run a second candidate in Janice Boylan who received 1,257 first preference votes, but combined both women still did not make up the 35% vote share won by the Sinn Féin leader last time around in Dublin Central.

Other parties on the left have done well, however, including Holly Cairns’ Social Democrats, a party that has seen its vote share increase from 2.9% in the last election to 4.8% now.

While on a lesser scale, Labour has enjoyed an increase taking 4.7% of the vote share this time, compared to 4.4% in 2020. This is now resulting in seat gains for both parties.

Addressing journalists before she was elected, Ms McDonald said: “We have now confirmed that we have broken the political mould here in this State, two-party politics is now gone, it’s consigned to the dustbin of history, that in itself is very significant.

The question now arises for us, what do we do with that? We are clear that we want to change people’s lives.

The general election has seen a further fragmenting of politics. Ireland has three major parties, which now enjoy around 20% of the vote, with the remaining 40% of votes going to the smaller parties and disparate Independents.

The political mould may have been broken, but that has not provided any sort of alternative to a government led by the two traditional parties.

Until parties on the left can organise into a coherent bloc, there may be no real threat to the political status quo.