In the aftermath of its successful election campaigns in the North and South, Sinn Fein will face into the expected marathon negotiating sessions leading up to June 30th with renewed confidence.

Of all the votes cast last week, it is the European Parliament vote in the South which gave it the most cheer. Relatively unknown candidates, with the exception of Martin Ferris in Munster, were able to garner impressive vote totals across the four Euro vote areas, a sign, said Sinn Fein analysts, that a republican core vote is now being established nation-wide in the Irish Republic.

But the party understands the steep gradient that lies ahead before it can become a significant player in the electoral scene in the Irish Republic. There are still large swathes of the State, including many traditional republican areas, where it has little footing. It realises that green-flag politics in the South is not enough in the modern era, pointing to the wipe-out of Republican Sinn Fein candidates and a few candidates with sympathies for the 32-County Sovereignty Movement as examples of that.

Electoral success, it realises, is a grittier battle than just mouthing republican mantras; it is won door-to-door in poor housing estates in Dublin, Monaghan and Belfast more than in the portals of power in Dublin, Washington and London. But Sinn Fein now feels it is definitely winning it.

The upshot of the good election result is that the current leadership of Sinn Fein will be strengthened considerably in their own internal politics, when they sit down opposite the two government leaders and the various political parties next week, during what is expected on all sides to be a frenetic negotiating session.

They will also have planned for a negative result from the talks and will probably have factored in what their next step will be in such circumstances.

It is not all gloomy on that front. Tony Blair's statement in Belfast last week that "we will have to look for another way" if the agreement cannot be implemented, can be interpreted, Sinn Fein says, in a positive light. The party also points to Mr Blair's blunt denunciations of the rejectionists on the unionist side in that speech as an interesting sign.

Thus, while unionists may prefer to see it as a sign that Mr Blair and Mr Ahern may seek to do the business by excluding Sinn Fein and working with the SDLP and Ulster Unionist Party, Sinn Fein believes the two leaders will take a different approach and implement all those areas of the agreement outside the Assembly and the executive.

Mr Blair's previously stated notion of "good governance" is an important concept for Sinn Fein. It is a society where human rights are respected, where cultural affinities are acknowledged, where police and judiciary are representative of the citizenry as a whole and where equal weight is given to the constitutional aspirations of both communities.

All that can be achieved, it believes, if the two governments "run hard" with the aspects of the Belfast Agreement that they can implement themselves in the event that the unionists refuse to form the executive without prior decommissioning.

There is faith in the two governments to do this if the unionists prove recalcitrant. "Ahern knows the historic nature of what has occurred the last few years and will not lightly abandon it," said a senior Sinn Fein official.

IT also continues to trust Mr Blair and Mo Mowlam, while utterly distrusting "the system" as it calls it, the permanent British bureaucracy which Sinn Fein says has time and again tried to impede the implementation of the Belfast Agreement.

In addition, it says both government leaders know it would be "crazy to destabilise nationalism" at a time when unionism is also so fragmented, another reason the party doubts there will be any attempt to foist the old exclusionary agenda on it.

It also says there is a growing realisation by the governments of the impact of the demographic changes in Northern Ireland. In the recent election over 300,000 voters cast ballots for nationalist candidates, giving them slightly over 45 per cent of the voting total. This reflects the overall demographic shift which was most recently published in the British government's own Continuous Household Survey.

Those figures, contained in the booklet, Northern Ireland, Key Facts, Figures and Themes for the years 1996/1997, showed the Catholic population moving to 43 per cent of the total and over 50 per cent of those under 16.

"Nationalists do feel empowered, do feel far more confident about themselves," a Sinn Fein source said.

Such good feeling should allow Sinn Fein to see David Trimble's difficulties in the upcoming negotiation in a more sympathetic light. It says it does, but makes it clear that as long as there is no difference between the public and private view being expressed by the Ulster Unionists on an insistence on prior decommissioning, Sinn Fein will make no major effort to bridge the gap.

The party feels it's been burned before when it reached out to Mr Trimble.

It expects the negotiations to come down to a welter of last-second manoeuvrings in the early hours on July 1st. The question of whether David Trimble is actually interested in a deal that includes it in government is one it finds impossible to answer. Some of its senior officials believe he will, citing the increasing concern in many sections of the unionist community that they will all be irrevocably tied to the images of mayhem and confrontation with the forces of the state that now characterise Drumcree if there is no deal by the July 1st deadline.

Others in Sinn Fein are not so sure and believe Mr Trimble has pinned himself on such a hook over decommissioning that it will be difficult for him to wriggle off.

For Sinn Fein the decommissioning battle occurs on two levels - the first is the round-table negotiations and the fight to win public opinion in the Dublin, Belfast and London. The second, the internal one, involves understanding the upshot of loyalist attacks on nationalists (over 160 since the beginning of the year) and the impact that the looming spectre of Drumcree will have in vulnerable nationalist areas.

Attempts to separate the two, as many opinion writers and politicians do, is to ignore reality, they say. For example, for several years now IRA operatives have stood guard on some isolated nationalist communities at the height of the madness surrounding Drumcree and the Twelfth. In at least two documented instances they have prevented major bloodshed by showing their weapons as loyalist gangs, bent on murder, approached.

That is the reality of the decommissioning debate, it says. All attempts to whitewash that will founder on the rock of learned experience. Thus, Sinn Fein's ability to manoeuvre in the negotiations will be constrained too by the lurking shadow of Drumcree and continuing attacks on nationalists.

However, Sinn Fein says Mr Trimble might be surprised about how willing it might be to effect a compromise within the framework of the agreement - if it believes he will stick to a deal that is done. There is perhaps more understanding for his position than even Mr Trimble himself might guess.

If that proves impossible, however, it will not be giving up on the process, merely shifting to a different lane and seeking to get the two governments committed to implementing all other aspects of the agreement that 71 per cent of the people voted for just over a year ago in order to save the process.

"We're in this until the last dog dies," said a leading Sinn Fein member, characterising his movement's determination to make the process that has benefited them enormously continue to work.

Niall O'Dowd is founding publisher of the Irish Voice newspaper