Elaine Loughlin: Sinn Féin stole the headlines, but the Alliance party made the greatest strides
Alliance Party leader Naomi Long with one of the party's new MLAs Patricia O'Lynn, the first woman elected in the North Antrim constituency, the late Ian Paisley's old stamping ground. Picture: Jonathan McCambridge/PA
While Sinn Féin has deservedly grabbed the headlines, the Northern Ireland elections has also revealed a growing chunk of the population who no longer look for green or orange on the ballot paper.
The seismic shift in Northern politics — which has led to Sinn Féin becoming the largest party and set to take over the position of First Minister — cannot be underplayed.
As Mary Lou McDonald put it, the Northern Ireland created just over 100 years ago was one which was engineered "precisely to prevent a Michelle O'Neill ever being in the office of First Minister".
The fact that 17 of Sinn Féin's elected MLAs are women also marks a significant point in the road to balanced representation and an achievement that parties on this side of the border could learn from.
But it is the centre ground represented by the Alliance Party which arguably has made the greatest strides in the election, more than doubling its representation to 17 seats.
This compares to Sinn Féin, which has remained stable, returning 27 seats, and the DUP, which lost three seats.
This changing appetite for fresh, liberal, non-aligned representation, especially among those who may have traditionally been seen as unionist voters, has seen a surge in support for a party that is designated as neither unionist nor Irish nationalist, but 'other', in the Assembly.
This move was especially obvious in North Antrim, once the political stronghold of Ian Paisley where, for the first time, a woman was elected.
In ousting DUP incumbent Mervyn Storey, who had been an MLA for North Antrim since 2003, Patricia O’Lynn also became the first Alliance Party member to represent the constituency in Stormont.
“A new day is on the horizon in North Antrim. The age of entitlement is over," Ms O'Lynn said after taking the seat.
Alliance Party leader Naomi Long said Ms O’Lynn's victory is a “breath of fresh air”, adding that the days of “stale, male, pale” politics in North Antrim were over.
The Alliance Party was founded in 1970 by a group of 16 who decided that a new cross-community party was needed to work on healing community divisions in Northern Ireland and to represent those with a liberal approach to social and economic issues.
Since then, the party has bobbed at around 9% support taking a few wobbles along the road, most notably in 2003 when it only managed to claim 3.7% in Assembly elections.
Claiming nine seats, including two seats in six constituencies, it has jumped two positions to become the third largest party in Stormont with 13.5% of the overall vote share.
However, politics in Northern Ireland has never been black and white and the success of the Alliance Party has pushed out what have been considered other centrists representatives including Clare Bailey of the Green Party.
The SDLP has also lost half of its representatives and is now down to just four Assembly seats. Whether this was partly down to some SDLP supporters lending their vote to Sinn Féin in a bid to get Ms O'Neill's members over the line to secure the First Minister position, will only be seen at the next election.
Likewise, it will take further elections to ascertain whether the massive jump in support for the Alliance Party is just a temporary bounce, or whether it represents a real and lasting change in politics in Northern Ireland away from an electorate which votes along sectarian lines.
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