Travel Tips

*Brown road signs are for tourist attractions, accomodation or places of local interest.

*Road signs are bilingual. White road signs give distance in miles and green road signs in KM.

* Amazingly enough, not everyone in Ireland has red hair...redheads are actually a minority ;)

* Irish Gaelic is spoken in Dingle, West Galway, West Cork, NW Donegal, Ring, Co. Waterford. However English is understood in these parts too. Irish is compulsory in school and for teaching jobs and some jobs in the civil service. Basically, once you leave school, Irish people never ever use the language again.

* Best Guiness is usually found in little country pubs, dont expect it to be of any great quality in Dublin as the drinking water there is foul, and so will the Guiness.

* About one third of the Republic's population live in Dublin. The rest of the country just cant afford to live in the capital.

* Irish people talk extremely fast, get used to it! :-) We Limerick people are the fastest talkers in the West!! :)

* Always carry an umbrella. 'nuff said!

* Dubliners have no sense of direction.Neither do they like the clean air "down the country" :)

* If you are thinking of moving to Ireland to work, pls check this website : http://working.monster.ie/

* If I were to make a phone call to Northern Ireland from Dublin, it would be considered an international phone call.

* You will not be in danger of terrorist attacks in the republic of Ireland, the IRA support the republic so dont worry about bombs etc.

* There are loads of posts on temperature/weather in Irelan at various times of the year... my advice is ...always pack a warm jumper or a coat...you could be lucky and it might be warm however the weather is very changeable and you could easily get caught in the rain wearing shorts & t-shirts (and thats not v pleasant, is it? :) )

* "Craic" is the Gaelic for "fun" ...it has nothing whatsoever to do with crack/cocaine :-)

* You NEVER EVER tip in a pub. In a restaurant, you can add 10-12 % or round up the bill to the nearest 0.

* If you live outside the EU, you are entitled to a VAT refund (VAT is an irish retail tax) within 2 months of purchases.

* Due to the new Smoking in the Workplace Act, smoking is banned in bars and restaurants. So you will have to go out outside and smoke there. Or you could take a nicotine sabbatical - 20 cigs cost over 6 Euro now.

Got this email recently, hope you find it funny ;-)
(there are a few missing, but no one will notice)

* Cavan = filthy, ignorant hillbillies, puritanical papists.
Hobbies:Discovering IRA ammo dumps and knitting black balcvavas.

* Kerry = stupid but loveable.
Hobbies: Gaelic football, scraping pig sh1t off their wellies and chain-smoking

* Wicklow north = sports car driving country snobs (Greystones, Enniskerry)
Hobbies: Sticking their noses in the air and referring to themselves
as "one"

* Wicklow south = sheep shaggers.. Hobbies: Sitting in field with their neighbors and talking about the "banjaxed hydraulics on the
JCB", collecting the dole

* Dublin north = criminals, drug dealers and factory workers, easy
women, unmarried mothers, skinheads and all-round examples of human waste.
Hobbies: Heroin and watching serials numbers being filed off stolen BWM's, doing hand-breakers

* Dublin south = west Brits, snobs, rich, easy glamorous women.
Hobbies:Depak Shropa. colonic irrigation and sleeping with their best friends spouse

* Limerick = violent, racist scum of the earth, plays rugby,knife-wielding prostitutes.
Hobbies: stabbing each other with screwdrivers and then complaining
about their city's bad reputation.

* Donegal = looks down on all-others, aloof.
Hobbies: Turning their noses up at
all and sundry

* Cork = jealous of Dubliners, highly-sexualized women.
Jack Lynch Tunnel and making smug faces at the cars with Dublin plates

* Tipperary = beautiful pristene girls, but hard to get into bed but
worth it if you can because that County does not have two different
Ridings for nothing! (Ryan, this obviously written by a non tipp person)
Hobbies: Getting a flat in Dublin and losing their accents and virginity
and hoping their parents do not find out.

* Meath = Dublin wannabe's.
Hobbies: Beating Dublin at GAA and hoping that one day somebody in Dublin actually noticing

* Galway City = sophisticated boggers could be mistaken for a South Dubliner, sexually adventurous, cultured and wealthy.
Hobbies: Teaching sex acrobatics to foreign tourists, dropping acid, paying a million pounds for a three-bedroom suburban house and pretending it was a bargain.

* Kildare = alcoholics.
Hobbies: Walking up in barns with a bottle on one side and hatchet-faced Biddy on the other.

* Mayo = Depressing, defeatist, negative, misery-laden losers,
emigrates as soon as the umbilical chord is cut. Usually gets killed in a construction site mishap before he is 21.
Hobbies: Dropping a lighted cigarette on his mattress and then being burned alive in a Cricklewood boarding house so he can have his remains flown back to Knock Airport for burial

* Louth = IRA supporters, smugglers and bandits, beautiful girls (Dundalk).
Hobbies: Tearing trough Castleblaney at 125MPH trying to stop the boxes of cheap vodlka from falling out the window.

* Waterford = decent honest hard-workers generally good folks with thick boghopper accents
Hobbies: Calling a strike

* Clare = fiddle playing charming simpletons with big bushy beards
Hobbies: Falling into pot-holes and being never heard from ever again

* Sligo = go-getters, strong sense of free enterprise, likes to make
cash.
Hobbies: get rich and two fingers to everything else

* Kilkenny = harmless innocent alcholics.
Hobbies: Sending their only son to fashion college in Dublin and then
wondering why he never brings
girls home and why he is always looking in the Brown Thomas catalogue?

* Offaly = mad for playing sports and having fun, generally liked.>
Hobbies: To win a pub

* Laois = the real boggers and proud of it, despite the slagging it gets from Dubliners.
Hobbies: Living a honest life and collected EU development grants

* Westmeath = Mysterious boggers, cryptic.
Hobbies: Try unsuccessfully, to get noticed

* Wexford = selling their "home-grown" organic fruit (bought at
supermarket that morning) at the side of the road in summer and
ripping-off gullible Dubliners out for a drive in the country.
Hobbies: Ripping off tourists is more than enough