Counts: Party activists have called for a reorganisation of how counts are conducted following complaints about their slowness around the country.
In what was one of the slowest election counts in memory, only a handful of county council candidates had been elected by late Saturday afternoon, while many local counts took two full days to complete and did not conclude until the early hours of yesterday morning.
Referendum, European and council ballot papers in many areas were separated at a central location before the local election ballots were transferred to another centre for counting.
This meant the counting for council seats did not begin until well into Saturday afternoon in many areas.
Candidates' teams also expressed anger about delays in the counting process for the four European elections on Sunday, where the first declaration came more than 12 hours after counting was scheduled to begin.
Yesterday Mr Mark Ryan, brother and campaign manager of Dublin MEP Mr Eoin Ryan, said there was "serious frustration" at the count centre at the RDS in Dublin on Sunday.
"There were seven different counting locations and between 250 and 300 staff, who were due to start counting at 9 a.m.," he said. "The reality is there wasn't a vote counted until 12 o'clock. They were sitting there for three hours with nothing to do."
In Dublin City Council, the largest local authority in the State, the count continued into Sunday, compared with 1999, when it ended on the Saturday evening.
A council spokeswoman noted the high turnout, which meant there were considerably more votes to count this year.