Dublin count: Sinn Féin supporters never skimp on the celebrations, and for the party's first MEP, North or South, there was no holding back.
Never mind that she only won the last seat in Dublin, and it was the middle of the night, Mary Lou McDonald was carried shoulder high from the RDS count centre early yesterday.
Outside, right on cue, a ghetto-blaster struck up the old country and western favourite: Hello Mary Lou (Goodbye Heart). But the habitual noisy part of the Sinn Féin celebrations over, the new MEP then called her campaign workers into the sort of huddle favoured by football teams.
It was a larger huddle than any football team's, because Sinn Féin have a lot of workers, and McDonald happily acknowledged her debt to them.
Among other things, she assured the huddle that this was not Mary Lou McDonald's seat - it belonged to Sinn Féin. Even at 3.30 a.m., the message was unblurred and the campaign zeal unrelenting.
The elections of De Rossa and, an hour earlier, of Fianna Fáil's Eoin Ryan were both overshadowed somewhat by the demise of each party's second candidate.
Ivana Bacik's was by far the more gallant defeat. But the spectacular rise and fall of Royston Brady lent a certain tension to the Ryan campaign, right to the last.
Some of the concern arose from what Ryan's people called Brady's "unusual" vote, and fears that it might not transfer to the other Fianna Fáil candidate in the numbers that, eventually, it did. Ryan's insecurity was not helped by the "bloody exit poll", as one source put it.
His dilemma in the face of Brady's early media onslaught was summed up by one campaign worker whose eight-year-old child reported the different images the two men had in school: "They thought Royston looked like a football player, whereas Eoin looked like Dad." But the Lord Mayor's celebrity status exploded mid-campaign and by polling day, Ryan's team tacitly confessed their man was benefiting from an "anyone but Royston" mood among Fianna Fáil supporters.
Having avoided the RDS on count day - uniquely among the main candidates - Brady made a solitary media outing yesterday on RTÉ's Gerry Ryan Show. He denied reports that he was considering abandoning politics altogether for a return to his original career in the hotel industry as typical of his misrepresentation in the press.
He also denied that he pursued a strategy of media-avoidance during the campaign, after a series of headline grabbing stunts as Lord Mayor. "I'm damned if I do talk to the media, and I'm damned if I don't," he said.
The biggest losers of the Euro elections were the Greens, going from two seats down to nothing. The prospect last week of a 50-50 Labour vote split between De Rossa and Bacik briefly revived Green hopes that Patricia McKenna might hold the Dublin seat, and with 40,000 first preferences she was still clinging to the thinnest of lifelines on Sunday night. But De Rossa's late campaign rally, boosted by some high-profile advertising, left her (and Bacik) with too much to do.
Suggestions that McKenna's future might lie in the Dáil met a less-than-lukewarm response from a candidate who thrived in the world of EU politics, far removed from the constituency clinic-driven Irish system.
John Gormley underlined the point: "The irony of it is that Patricia thrives on European policy issues, even though the election campaigns don't touch on the issues at all, and this was probably the worst one ever in that respect."
Gormley was determinedly optimistic, however. "I still think there are two Green [Dublin and Ireland East] seats in Europe, and I'm sure we'll win them back," he said.
The success of Fine Gael's election generally was summed up by the early departure of its supporters from the RDS on Sunday.
Where other parties had to sweat or at least wait late into the night, Gay Mitchell's election was done and dusted on the first count.
At which point successful council candidates and workers were off to party headquarters for a celebratory barbecue, and a place in the sun.
