The best description of Ireland’s political landscape after Friday’s general election might be: strangely familiar. The familiar bit is easy. The two main incumbent parties, Micheál Martin’s Fianna Fáil and Simon Harris’s Fine Gael, received almost exactly the same combined share of the vote (43%) as they did in 2020. As a result, the identical twins of Irish politics that have governed the state since it came into being just over a century ago will continue to do so.

One of them, Fianna Fáil, which has won the most seats this time, emerged as the dominant political machine in the 1930s and was almost permanently in charge until its vote imploded in 2011 after the bloody death of the Celtic Tiger. It is now edging back, if not towards its old ascendancy, then certainly into a comfortable seat at the centre of power. Its like-minded partner, Fine Gael, has been continually in government in one form or another since 2011, and if the incoming administration lasts a full term it will remain there until 2029.

So, same old, same old. But this familiarity itself feels strange. At the most obvious level, in this global year of elections, Irish voters have bucked the trend established by their counterparts in Britain, the US, France, Japan and South Africa and have declined to give the incumbents a good kicking. Amid the turbulence of so much of the democratic world, Ireland seems, on the surface at least, perversely calm.

Below the surface, though, there are paradoxes and perplexities. This was no simple vote of confidence in the status quo. Whatever the electorate in Ireland’s increasingly complex and fragmented political system is saying, it is something much more ambiguous than a big thumbs-up emoji.

The first oddity to be understood is that the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael duopoly is in fact........

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