First let me say Ireland was the trip of a lifetime and a dream come true! Everything that I hoped it would be and more! It is definitely worth the trip, and as far as our first trip flying half way across the world goes (we travelled from Canada), it was actually a really smooth & safe trip.
Without further ado, here is all I learned from our trip to Dublin & the South Ireland countryside.
Transportation
Transportation
Inside Dublin
Depending what part of Dublin you are staying in, there are quite a few transportation options. The usual is walking, bus or taxi, but there is also light rail transit to some parts of the city. If you would like to use LRT, you will want to check out it's routes before you book your overnight stays. I kept seeing posts about the LRT but it was not widely accessible across Dublin.
Walking and taxi's are self-explanatory, except for those of you who are not used to toll roads, your taxi may go over some on your routes and that will add €3 to your total every toll they pass through.
⭐ The bus transit system was briefly mentioned in some blogs, but that's about it, a mention that it existed. It is really easy to use, once you get the hang of it....but it took us both a lot of Googling to figure it out - however here it is all in one place for you! First, the biggest confusion is that there are several different bus companies, we saw one near our hotel and searched it, but soon found out it didn't go everywhere, because these different companies tend to cover different areas. However, we noticed several different branded buses all had TFI on them, so we searched that and found out that all buses inside Dublin are under Transit for Ireland (TFI) and so all TFI buses take the same fare. Back to being a simple system, as you don't have to pay attention to the companies, only TFI.
As for ways to pay for bus fare, you will likely choose one based on how long you will be in Dublin. Bus fare for a one-way trip is €2 and can be paid with coin. Some major bus stops have a machine that takes tap and gives you a ticket, however we only ever saw one stop with a machine like that though.
The next best type of fare is a TFI Leap Card. There is the Visitor Pass, which has various options. There are 1, 2, 3 and 7 day visitor passes, which you pay a flat fee for, and saves you money if you will be using the bus more than 2 trips per day. They begin the day purchased, and expire on the last day, they are not reloadable. We found these types of passes were not as convenient to find a place that sold them, you may have to call around to find a place because the TFI website only lists 3 locations. The more common type of pass is a reloadable Leap Card, which you pay €5 for the card itself, and then add however many euro you want based on how many rides you will take, but it never expires. These types of cards have many more locations where they can be reloaded.
Lastly, how to find the buses you need is also very easy. I chose to use Google maps to search for directions and then choose the bus option for routes. This would give all the information we needed about stop locations, bus stop #s, bus #s, how many stops between when you get on and off, and a map to follow along. If you search Google maps when you have internet access, it downloads the GPS information of every place you search so that you are able access that map when you don't have access to internet. My husband found this same bus information on the TFI website as well and would then take screen shots to retain the information offline.
Outside Dublin
Our car rental was €391, including insurance (will touch back on this later), for 3 days with an automatic mid-size car (cheaper for manual vehicles). My husband also loves driving and he adapted to the other side of the car and road easily, so a road trip through Ireland's countryside was really attractive to us. We also planned to get groceries for quite a few of our meals, which we are so thankful we had a vehicle for that. The other advantage of renting our car was that we were on our own timeline, we could go when we wanted and stay as long as we wanted, and we even went further down the coast than one tour was going, so we got to see an even better beach. We travelled just over 900 km, and spend €160 on petrol, parking & highway tolls (see more info below), which for us ended up being worth the freedom. If you don't like the idea of driving in Ireland, the bus tours are a very viable option, and kilometer for kilometer it is actually cheaper if you have the room in your schedule to stick to their timetable. 
One quick note about the car insurance, there are two types. When I booked the rental I needed to take collision insurance which was $50 CDN. Then in Ireland we needed to get the type of insurance every driver needs, which was reasonable in price for the 3 days, however the difference in Ireland is that they have a €5000 deductable that they place on hold on your credit card until the vehicle is returned. Different credit cards may deal with this differently, ours never showed as more than a pending transaction, which was cleared a few days after our return. It was great incentive to drive very carefully!
We spent all our evenings in Dublin so we'd have the same bed & room for every night of our stay, but we took several day trips outside Dublin, for which there are two main options, rent a car or take a bus tour.
⭐ I actually didn't see any options for bus tours in any blogs, I only ever saw recommendations for car rentals. It was only once we were there and had already rented a car that I discovered them and checked into whether they would have been worth it as an alternative. With the bus tour options available for our wish list places, I calculated the amount the 4 bus tours would cost for two people, and it would have been approx. €350, leaving from Dublin each tour. There are quite a few bus tour options so I won't post a link, but Google will be of great service if you search 'bus tour' to the attraction you are interested in.
One quick note about the car insurance, there are two types. When I booked the rental I needed to take collision insurance which was $50 CDN. Then in Ireland we needed to get the type of insurance every driver needs, which was reasonable in price for the 3 days, however the difference in Ireland is that they have a €5000 deductable that they place on hold on your credit card until the vehicle is returned. Different credit cards may deal with this differently, ours never showed as more than a pending transaction, which was cleared a few days after our return. It was great incentive to drive very carefully!
Parking & Tolls
If you do rent a car, you will likely have to deal with these two additional costs as well.
⭐ On our taxi ride to our hotel, we were introduced to toll roads, and our driver was kind enough to suggest we ask our car hire company how these will work. Some toll roads are automatic and they charge to the license plate, which will be added to your rental invoice at the end of your trip, and the others are toll booths that accept coins and cards, but only exact change for coins. Our car rental had a GPS system in it, which showed us toll roads so we knew when to expect them. Also, side note about GPS, if you will not be using roaming for your phone to access Google maps, I highly suggest requesting a vehicle with GPS. Some exit ramps and round about exits can be quite confusing without GPS assistance. 
⭐ Parking was another thing that we were not adequately prepared for. You would think it would be straightforward and similar to where you are from, for example in Canada you can pay for parking with credit cards. We ran into a few tourist attractions where the parking was only able to be paid for by coin or App, they sealed off or removed the ability to pay by card or tap. Since we were not paying for roaming for our phones (a $15 CDN/day charge for us) and we intentionally didn't carry cash, we had absolutely no way to pay for parking at these places. There was no wifi accessible close enough for us to download and use the App either, though we tried really hard to make that work. I would suggest searching the attraction website to check ahead of time if they have information on their parking, or if you are not carrying cash, keeping less than €10 in change on you just for parking will avoid these types of hassles.
Accommodations
⭐ Something else new to this Canadian is that most hotels in Ireland charge the entire stay's invoice upon check-in, or a daily damage deposit of €100 or €200. I found this information buried deep within my hotel details after I had booked our room. Our hotel allowed us to pay by credit card but some of the hotels I researched asked for cash daily deposit, just something to be very aware of, especially if you book a hotel that doesn't have a cancellation policy.
⭐ The Bed & Breakfast offering is also another common hotel add on, where you can book the hotel's breakfast every day included in the price of your hotel room. This isn't unique, however expecting that all guests will do it is an assumption that hotel staff seem to make, and if you don't add it to your booking but you want to eat at the restaurant, you will want to be very clear that you will be paying for breakfast. It's not fun being low-key accused of trying to scam a free breakfast! This was a unique situation with regards to payment as well because you were asked to pay upfront before entering the breakfast buffet restaurant.
Food & Drink
While we are on the subject of food, this is one thing I knew in advance, thanks to a penny-wise friend who had recently been to Ireland, the food is expensive. If euro were CDN dollars, it would have been about the same as here at home, but with the exchange rate at 1.5 x, not so much. For this reason, we did a lot of smaller meals and buying groceries for easy meals that we could keep in the small fridge in our hotel room.
⭐ Another thing to note, hours of restaurants are not consistent and may depend on what part of the city you are in. Our hotel was in a suburb of Dublin city centre, and all restaurants within walking distance were either in the nearby mall, so mall hours, or there were restaurants who closed all access except drive-thru before 11 am and after 8 pm.
Then, in the city centre, we wandered around looking for places open for breakfast or coffee and there were only a few open before 10 am on a Thursday morning. We finally found a Starbucks to appease us for a few hours, but then again, most places didn't open for lunch until noon either. Thankfully we wandered far enough during that time that we finally found a breakfast & lunch pub at 11:30 am which was a really great authentic local treat and still had some seats open.
⭐ Coffee is a crucial must-have for a lot of people, but it is a rare few who still just want plain black coffee and not all the espresso, foam, specialty milks, syrups, etc. If you happen to be one of these people in Ireland, a black cup of coffee can be very, very hard to get. A lot of small cafe's won't even offer it. Starbucks didn't have any brewed coffee any of the times we went, and had to brew fresh or make a pour over. One place the guy just refused to acknowledge you can't order a black coffee and gave my husband an Americano even though he repeated 'just black coffee' 3 times. So, you may either want to suck it up, say 'when in Ireland', and have the espresso (though it is more expensive), or bring your own instant coffee packages, or be prepared to hunt it down. I was also a little disappointed Irish Cream flavor wasn't prominent on any coffee menu.
Also, just a shout out to two great places we found to eat! Bull & Castle (across from Christ Church Cathedral) was phenomenal in food, service, environment, and it was the best steak I've had - but paid much less than the previous best steak (ahem....a Ramsey restaurant). Hubby said his fish was the best he's ever had as well, and better than most steaks he's had, lol. The second place was O'Connell's which was exactly the authentic pub experience we were hoping for, it rang true Irish in every respect and the food was terrific! It was within walking distance of one of the major tourist trips as well, so easy to fit into your day of walking around Dublin.
Inside Dublin
One of the best pieces of advice I read on a few travel blogs about Dublin was the Go City Pass. It offered great flexibility in choices for deals on attractions, whether you are trying to see as many things as you can in a few days or see very specific attractions, you will save money. In a large city there are usually a lot of variety for types of attractions and Dublin is no exception, you will find a lot of things that interest you, and the Go City Pass was a great way to find most of them, but not all of them so be sure to check out pamphlets in your hotel or trip advisor as well.
⭐ On our 2nd last day in Dublin we met up with an old friend of mine who used to live in Canada, and after telling her about our plans to visit the Dublin Zoo on our last day, a Monday, she asked if that was because we knew a lot of the museums are closed on Mondays. Nope, that was purely coincidental, someone was looking out for us! In fact, our first Monday, a week prior, we had decided that was the day to explore castles, and so we hadn't had to worry about it that day either. So, if you are in Dublin on a Monday, especially if you only have a few days, be sure to look in advance at the days of operation of any museum type places you hope to visit. It always pays to be prepared because you won't always be as lucky as we ended up!
⭐ Those of you who may not be interested in the largest tourist attraction, Guinness brewery, or even any of the whiskey distilleries or museums, because you just aren't that into beer or whiskey (like me), if you ARE into history I'd still highly recommend going! These were my husband's must-see attractions, but I found the tours incorporated a lot of very interesting history that kept me quite interested along both our tour of Guinness and Teeling Distillery.
And yes, we went to Teeling, not Jamison, not for any particular reason other than convenience, but as we found out from our fellow tour members, this tour far exceeded the quality of the Jamison tour. Jamison's tour is through an old distillery building no longer in use and it's set up in mock production, where as Teeling you are able to go through their actual, in use distillery which is quite fascinating. And while both are a family run business, I doubt you get 'grandpa Jamison' joining and then interrupting the tour to share some truly insider details 😊 I never knew I could be so interested in how beer and whiskey were such a large & integral part of Dublin through the centuries!
Most information on attractions is readily available everywhere, so I won't go into all the places we saw, but here is a sampling of photos from our favorites in Dublin.
Outside Dublin
The same goes for Ireland in general, if you want to leave Dublin and check out other attractions, there are quite a few options. I would suggest just searching your specific interests, do you want amazing cliffs, beautiful beaches, quaint villages, castles? Outside Dublin our interest was mainly in castles and the coast, so that's what I did searches for, and then narrowed down options based on how far we wanted to drive and how many places we wanted to stop on that day trip, and then pieced together an itinerary for ourselves.
Castles
Our selection of castles was based on how far we felt comfortable driving (being new to left side of the road, right side of the car driving) and how much we'd get to see having to drive all the way from Dublin and back to our hotel for the night. This eliminated a few castles including the Blarney castle, as we heard if you aren't in line early in the morning, you may be in line most of the day, and that just wasn't what we wanted for a day in Ireland. So we looked for castles closer to us that weren't as huge of a tourist attraction.
There are several castles around Dublin that you can visit by car in less than an hour. One castle we chose was Malahide because it is barely outside Dublin and it is still fully furnished from various era's since the castle was built about 850 years ago. Also, they have a lot to see on their grounds and a lot of free parking.
We also chose to visit Trim Castle (only about 45 min. away from out hotel) which was also 850 years old but completely abandoned and mostly beautiful ruins. Trim also had tours but there was a school tour going on when we arrived so we opted to explore the grounds ourselves and didn't enter the actual castle. It was still well worth the trip. This was one of those tricky parking places though, a small lot and not all of their machines took credit cards, though we finally found one that did.
We found that these were great contrasting choices of castles to visit and appreciated each one uniquely. You also don't have to leave Dublin to see castles, there are several within the city as well.
Coasts
Being that one of main reasons for choosing Ireland as our dream destination was it's coasts, rocky beaches and cliffs overlooking the ocean, we searched out some great spots along the southern coast to check out. When looking at the map of Ireland, I saw a highway hugging the coastline moving south of Dublin, so I Googled beaches along that route to a certain distance away and picked out a few that had descriptive reviews that sounded pleasant.
One of those places was Bray, which also had an aquarium I was excited to check out. Once we got there it was just what I was hoping for, a long beach with waves crashing, a quaint village to walk through....however, this was the place that we just could not park because we had no change or internet access. We stayed for about 10 minutes, watching for parking people and then went on to the next place. But at least we got this beautiful rainbow to see while we were there!
The next beach, Ballymoney, was very secluded, with a lot of narrow roads through the countryside to get there, but it was just what I imagined and hoped we would find. It's a shame it started raining quite a bit at this point in our day, so it was far too cold & windy to try to dip our toes in. We ended up staying less than half an hour but took in as much of the cliche Irish coastal vibe as we could, including passing a guy who looked just like Captain Highliner!
Lastly, we absolutely had to make room in our trip for a full day trip out to see the Cliffs of Moher. About a 6 hour round trip drive from Dublin, we were so thankful that the rain was just a sprinkle and that it cleared up by the time we got to the cliffs so we could see them in splendid sunshine. Having admired photos of these cliffs for decades, it was hard to fathom I was actually standing on them and taking my own spectacular photographs! There is a lot of hiking to get these views, and depending on the weather some of the dirt trails may not be safe, but if you can cross the entire expanse (visitor's center is right in the middle of these two views below), it's worth the breathtaking vantage points. If you don't want to try that drive yourself, I'd suggest taking the tour, this was definitely a highlight of the trip and if you can find a way to do it, I'd encourage it!
Driving through the rolling green hills of Irish countryside, dotted with beautiful yellow flowers and many sheep made the drives worth it as well. All the Ireland stereotypes did not disappoint, and we had a wonderful time driving around Southern Ireland (when we weren't on steep inclines passing trucks on narrow roads 😛).
So that's about it! Everything I wish I knew before we left, but honestly, even discovering it along the journey was simply minor inconveniences compared to how lucky we felt to be there. I hope this helps you plan for the trip of your dreams and enjoy Ireland to the max!
