Once again, a sudden gain by a minority party is being hailed as a landslide victory – even though it is nothing of the sort. A cursory glance at the election results makes it clear that the numbers don’t add up: Sinn Féin now has 37 seats, one less than Fianna Fail and two more than Fine Gael. So the boring old middle-of-the-road Establishment parties, who have been in power since the foundation of the State and spent the past four years in a symbiotic “Confidence & Supply” relationship, have fifty percent of the vote. This figure, coupled with the widespread, publicly expressed disillusionment with the Government, implies that the vote for Sinn Féin was merely a protest vote – and that a cautious 50 percent of voters actually voted against Sinn Féin.