Even though its a bad result (any defeat is) and maybe it’s purely because my own club had our own disaster a few years ago that I don’t look on this quite as harshly as some others.
First reason is that I don’t think Irish teams (north or south) are as bad as they were 40 years ago and we know that our league isn’t in the same place either.
Secondly, I‘ve been watching Scottish football since around 1995 and the feeling has always been that we should be hammering teams from smaller countries/weaker leagues. For people my age this has been taught to us and we’ve probably taught it to the next generation too. In my experience though we don’t have too much to back this up though and it’s not a new thing, I remember us squeezing through against Shelbourne in 1997 (3-2 on aggregate). The same team were then 3-0 up against Dick Advocaats Rangers EBT 11, admittedly losing in the end up. I can’t be bothered going through to check all of the Scottish teams results against the others in the British Isles since then right now but might do later. But I doubt I’ll find many results this century where teams (outwith the obvious 3) from Scotland have easily beaten others from our neighbouring countries.
To summarize - a bad result but not one that is completely unexpected.