It isn't easy for us in the South to understand the political motivation of the Northern electorate. To many people here it seems very odd that the closer the North moves towards peace, the more extreme its politics becomes.
Far from welcoming the prospect of a return to normality, the Northern voters appear repelled by such a prospect.
The peace process has been the precipitating factor in this development. Both sides in the North share a view of this process: that it has delivered political benefits to the nationalists to the discomfiture of unionists.
To unionists this shift in the political balance appears as an unjust reward for a quarter of century of violence inflicted on their community by the IRA.
Nationalists feel themselves to have been equally victims of violence by both the security forces and the sectarian loyalist paramilitaries - between whom there seems at times to have been collaboration - and thus see the peace process as a positive development that everyone should welcome.
Disillusionment with a peace process that after five years has not led to the elimination of what they see as a potential threat from an armed IRA has hardened unionist attitudes, and has greatly increased scepticism about the UUP negotiators' capacity to deliver.
This has encouraged a vote shift towards the DUP, which that party has encouraged by modifying some of its offensive rhetoric and by partly marginalising its leader, Ian Paisley. However, almost all of the seats won by the DUP have been the outcome of a movement of voters away from various breakaway unionist parties. The UUP did not lose votes.
It may be more difficult for us in the South to understand the scale of the shift in nationalist votes to Sinn Féin.
First of all, many in the South feel a strong sympathy with the SDLP, whose constitutional stance over several difficult decades helped to protect us from an overflow of Northern violence into our State.
Without the bulwark of the SDLP a growth of political support for Sinn Féin during the course of the IRA campaign might have encouraged that organisation to raise violence in the North to a civil war level that could have threatened the security of our state. As it was, we found it difficult enough to cope with IRA bank robberies, murders of gardaí and of Senator Billy Fox, and riots in Dublin in 1972 and 1981.
Moreover, we are also very conscious of the constructive role played by John Hume - ultimately at a huge cost to his own party - in opening the way to the peace process through his discussions with Gerry Adams in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
It seems to us unfair that his party's reward for these efforts should be its displacement as the largest nationalist party by Sinn Féin.
Why has this happened? Partly, of course, because a revolutionary movement like Sinn Féin/IRA evokes amongst its supporters a loyalty, energy and discipline which, when diverted into political channels, gives it a great advantage over constitutional political parties like the SDLP.
The SDLP has also suffered from the fact that, coming into existence at a single critical moment in the early 1970s, it has been a single-generation party, with too much initial talent to have felt a strong need to recruit later generations into its ranks.
Sinn Féin's gain in votes from the SDLP partly reflects the extent to which the new nationalist voters of the past five years, most of them with little or no memory of the IRA violence of the 1970s and 1980s, are overwhelmingly Sinn Féin supporters.
After this election we are clearly in new political territory. Restoration of devolved government in Northern Ireland now requires the consent of the DUP as well as of Sinn Féin, the SDLP, and the UUP. What prospects are there of such an outcome?
More than may appear at first sight. The composition of the DUP has changed over the years - with the religious element gradually giving way to the political wing.
The tone of Ian Paisley's denunciation of the idea of a DUP negotiation with Sinn Féin, and his explicit threat to have anyone who talked to that party expelled, provides clear evidence of his fear that such a move is in fact contemplated by some in his party.
And his attempt to explain away the limited role he played in the campaign was lame and unconvincing. It is clear that his party sought to marginalise him and to prevent him from speaking during the campaign.
In fact, with the exception of one matter, the DUP position as presented during this campaign does not seem to pose any insuperable obstacle to the formation of a new Executive. As and when Sinn/Féin IRA completes the promised process of decommissioning and announce the end of "the war", thus converting the IRA into an old soldiers' organisation, the DUP could justify an announcement that its demands have been met, enabling it to enter a four-party executive.
And Sinn Féin's interest in playing a role in the politics of our State gives them a powerful motivation to make this move within the next couple of years.
The obstacle to such a development is the DUP's demand for a new agreement, which none of the other three parties can accept. Could this be fudged, for example, by the DUP presenting the outcome of the forthcoming review of the Belfast Agreement as a "renegotiation"? Perhaps.
But a minority of the party might, and almost certainly would, reject such a fudge. And so long as Ian Paisley remains the party's leader - and he clearly has no current intention of departing from that post while he lives - it would be difficult for the political-minded majority in the party to ignore a minority led by him.
Thus there have to be doubts about an early agreement on a new Executive. Nevertheless all the conditions necessary for an eventual restoration of self-government in Northern Ireland are present. It has, I believe, become a question of "when", not of "whether".
To anyone concerned with the restoration of peace and stability in Northern Ireland this further delay is immensely frustrating. But future historians of this period may well take the view that a delayed settlement incorporating the DUP was worth waiting for.
For a settlement that excluded that party because it was reached before the DUP became the leading unionist party would always have been vulnerable to their later emergence in that role.