Finglas returned Dessie Ellis, once jailed for eight years on explosives charges and famously extradited to Britain where he was simultaneously acquitted and expelled; Artane elected Larry O'Toole, trade unionist and community worker, whose vote-winning prospects were not harmed when a drug-dealer shot him in the back at his granddaughter's communion ceremony last year.
Across the city in Tallaght, the predictable election of Sean Crowe - the very model of the party's new clean-cut activist and the best prospect of its next Dail seat - was accompanied by that of Mark Daly, a 25-year-old newcomer probably best-known in the area for his GAA exploits.
Yet paradoxically, it was in Tallaght that the results caused most soul-searching in the other parties, from the diminishing electoral dividends for mainstream politicians in the poorer areas, to the nature of Sinn Fein's appeal. In the immediate wake of the election count, Labour TD Pat Rabbitte spoke of the gulf between the number of constituency files he had in the Killinarden area - 680-odd - and the number of votes he won there - 50; and talked of the "catastrophe" it would be if Labour and Fianna Fail (Fine Gael doesn't have a presence) pulled out of such areas.
Fianna Fail sources echoed his exasperation but also wondered at Sinn Fein's ability to get the vote out. "We knocked on the doors on polling day and politely asked people who might be supporters to come out, and they said `we'll be down later' or whatever, but they didn't," said a party member.
"Then you'd see Sinn Fein vehicles arriving at the polling stations and dozens of people from the same areas piling out of them. Nobody will convince me it was love of Sinn Fein that got them out."
Nobody disputes what the dominant election issue was in the city's poorer areas. As elsewhere, Tallaght's watershed event between the last local election and this one was the drugs epidemic, and the way it was tackled by the community. Sinn Fein members were prominent in the effort, though often operating under the umbrella of community groups and the anti-drugs alliances.
In fact, the effort extended well beyond drugs. In the past two years in Tallaght, mass meetings followed the horrific death of a taxi-driver killed in a car theft incident and the fatal stabbing of a young man (who happened to be the son of a republican). The gardai and, to a lesser extent the mainstream politicians, were in the dock on both occasions, with emotions running high.
At another similar event, gardai, TDs and even the local parish priest were helpless observers as a petty drug-dealer was "confronted" and, by acclamation of the meeting, given 48 hours to leave the area. "It was like the Red Guard courts," said one witness, embarrassed at his inability to influence the proceedings.
Sean Crowe agrees that drugs were the big issue in the area, "that and the general neglect of estate management", but there was "no vigilante thing", he insists. "We're totally opposed to that. What we did was bring the community together, in meetings and marches on the houses of drug-dealers and so on.
"The idea was to put psychological pressure on those dealing in drugs or joy-riding, and also - equally important - to focus pressure on the gardai to act."
Another successful tactic he points to was the erection of "huts" at estate entrances, which were manned throughout the night by community activists.
"They were only observing what was going on - it wasn't vigilantism or anything like it, but crime in those areas went down to zero." The same Fianna Fail source claims the huts only further ghettoised areas: "It was typical Sinn Fein: let's be highly visible rather than actually work to improve the situation in the long term." While agreeing about the opportunism of the tactic, Pat Rabbitte can however see its attractions, especially to fearful parents. "It's perfectly understandable that there should be outrage in these communities, which have been tortured by anti-social behaviour for years," he said.
"Dublin Corporation has traditionally been an absentee landlord and it will take years to reverse the neglect, but it's things like the drugs task forces we set up and the work being done now by [Minister of State] Chris Flood which is ma king the difference, not Sinn Fein."
Returned yet again in the north inner city where his massive surplus helped to elect Christy Burke, Independent TD Tony Gregory insists that "you can't generalise about Sinn Fein's vote". of his friend Burke's success, he adds: "That has nothing to do with the drugs issue. It's a personal vote, for someone who does a great deal of work in the area, more than any TD, I might add."
Having said that, he believes the election of Nicky Kehoe in Cabra-Glasnevin had everything to do with the drugs campaign there.
Gregory participated in some of the Cabra protests and thinks Sinn Fein's ability to organise large marches and meetings was the key to its electoral success.
"Cabra is very compact community, with Finbarr's [the GAA club in which Kehoe is prominent] at the centre of it. It's ideal for organising mass meetings or marches, and Sinn Fein was very visible in that whole campaign."
Fianna Fail TD Pat Carey, who topped the poll in Finglas - comfortably ahead of Dessie Ellis's surprise performance - also offers a more benign view of the Sinn Fein breakthrough.
"There's a big traditional vote for them here, so there were probably 1,500 votes available even before they started, but they also targeted the area and they did what parties like ours used to do very well and need to get back to, getting out and knocking on the doors. They also probably got some of the old Workers' Party vote, the part that didn't follow De Rossa into Democratic Left."
A decisive event for the area's politics was last St Patrick's Day, when - not for the first time on the national holiday - under-age drinking, vandalism and car theft contributed to an evening of terror for residents. Ellis and Sinn Fein were prominent in the campaign for better policing, but so, Carey says, were the area's TDs, who held a series of meetings afterwards with gardai. Either way, policing has greatly improved and Sinn Fein - whose criticism of the gardai tends to be louder and more public - won votes for it.
Carey echoes the general praise for Sinn Fein's talent for organising public meetings as well as the criticisms of the way those meetings are sometimes orchestrated. He agrees that the residents' committees set up by Sinn Fein in the wake of those meetings have been a positive development.
Sinn Fein itself is neither surprised by its success nor carried away with it. "What kept us back for so long was the censorship," says Rita O'Hare, the party's director of publicity, "but people want good, tough fighters, which they know Sinn Fein are. "They've seen what we did in the North: 15 years ago Alex Maskey was our only councillor in Belfast and he was spat at and abused and threatened daily and loyalists tried several times to kill him, and now we're the biggest party on the council."
She rejects the suggestion that Sinn Fein in the Republic doesn't have the quality of candidates it has in the North, where the leadership was tempered in three decades of violence.
"There's nothing like hard times for honing political skills, but there's also nothing that special about the people we have in the North. Someone like Sean Crowe is as thoughtful a politician as anyone in Sinn Fein, and everything has to start somewhere."