If the average mainland newsreader caught sight of anything about the election results in Northern Ireland over the past few weeks, it was probably some breathless reporting about the headline fact that Sinn Féin is now the Province’s largest party in terms of parliamentary seats. Or perhaps this absurd piece, from a self-described “peacebuilder”, practically salivating over the “fall of the House of Paisley” in North Antrim and trying to suggest it means Greater Ireland is on the way.

Au contraire, say I. This result is actually a very positive development for Northern Irish unionism — no net loss of seats overall, but a huge leap forward in the diversity of Unionist voices now represented in Parliament. 

This is long overdue. The Belfast Agreement was supposed to do many things, but one of those things was avoiding precisely this sort of zero-sum ‘headcount politics’. With Northern Ireland’s constitutional position to be settled by referendum, the hope and expectation was that a more normal politics would emerge.

Suffice to say that didn’t happen: the compromises involved in securing the Agreement, and the subsequent laundering of terrorists’ records in the name of the peace, rehabilitated the extremes and saw Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party supplant their moderate and constitutional rivals, the SDLP and the Ulster Unionists.

Disgracefully, New Labour then bowed to pressure from both to collude in pulling the ladder up after them. In the St Andrews Agreement, Peter Hain signed off on a huge change to how Stormont works: instead of the first minister being nominated by the largest designation (unionist or nationalist), it is now the largest party. 

Northern Ireland already suffered from having minimal voter transfer between its biggest blocs of voters. All of a sudden, transfers between parties within those blocs were no longer risk-free. The DUP and SF focused on consolidating their position in each community, even as turnout slumped and devolved government ground to a halt.

This sorry process reached its Westminster nadir at the 2017 election, which saw both the UUP and the SDLP wiped out. If not for North Down continuing its proud tradition of being a weird little place of its own, every single seat in the Province would have been held by the DUP/SF duopoly.

Contrast that with the situation today. Yes, the headline seat total for Unionism is slightly lower. But the breadth of representation is transformed, with the Ulster Unionists, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), and an Independent Unionist joining the DUP on the green benches. 

You probably need to go back to 1997 (when North Down was briefly held by the anti-devolution UK Unionist Party) to find the last time the full range of constitutional Unionist opinion was represented in the House of Commons, and all the way back to 1979 to find four different shades of capital-U Unionism in Parliament at the same time.

This is an untrammelled good. It means that the important debates Unionism needs to have can be conducted in the open, between parties, rather than discreetly stitched up behind closed doors, and a wider range of Unionist options will always appeal to a broader pool of voters than “unionist unity” ever could.

It suits both the ailing DUP and those trying to flog some life into the dead horse of a border poll to try and present this fragmentation as evidence of weakness. But the geography of these results completely refutes that thesis. It is precisely where Unionism is strongest that voters were willing and able to back an alternative to the Democratic Unionists.

In North Antrim, where Jim Allister ended the 54-year reign of the Paisleys, Unionist candidates took a combined 65 per cent of the vote, and placed first and second. In North Down (Independent gain) it was 64 per cent, first and third. In South Antrim (UUP gain) it was again 65 per cent, with Unionists in first and second place.

Even Lagan Valley, where the constitutionally-neutral Alliance picked up a seat from Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, the former DUP leader, is probably evidence of the same trend: even discounting that many of Sorcha Eastwood’s voters will be pro-Union, capital-U Unionist candidates came second, third and fourth, with 59 per cent of the vote.

Nationalism is currently lagging behind Unionism in terms of breaking the diarchy

Nationalism is currently lagging behind Unionism in terms of breaking the diarchy and diversifying its parliamentary representation, with Sinn Féin grimly trying to maintain a sense of momentum out of optical victories such as the First Minister’s office even has polling on a border poll goes nowhere and their advance in the Republic is thrown into sharp reverse.

But it’s telling that one genuinely competitive seat — Foyle, which spans the western portion of Londonderry — is likewise a seat where the “other side” has absolutely no chance of winning. (The other SDLP seat, South Belfast and Mid Down, has had no SF candidate in the last two elections – pure headcount politics.)

The evidence of this election is fresh proof for something which ought always to have been obvious: that where unionism or nationalism is confident, it diversifies. We must now hope that Unionism can build on this excellent result in the years ahead, and that Nationalist voters can find their way to a wider range of representatives — perhaps some more who will actually do the job.