My travel plans keep changing! It now looks like my husband may be asked to take a posting in Dublin for 2 years. While this is a travel oriented site I thought I would ask anyway.

Any posters here who can point to to sites where I can find information about living in Dublin or tell me their experiences and make suggestions about...well ..everything ?

His work would be in the centre of the city so I am not sure which suburbs to look at for accommodation?

Our 15 year old daughter will be coming with us so I need to check out schools which obviously will have different system than in Australia.

What about the weather - one keeps hearing about constant rain?

Rainfall in Dublin is actually less than in Sydney but the weather is`alas a lot coooler.There are lots of people from Australia living in Dublin - I met one today for example and another one yesterday.If funds are good live near the Dart railway line on the south side of Dublin Bay. Ballsbridge,Blackrock and Dalkey have excellent facilities and private schools if you want your daughter to attend one.There are 116 million reference to Dublin if you put the word Dublin in Google-and there are 156 million for Sydney. Dublin is the headquarters of Ryanair,Europes largest low cost airline, so use it to travel to most cities in Europe for less than 100 euros if you book early.

When people talk about rainiin Ireland they usually don;t mena the kind of downpours that you get in warmer clients. What you get is a lot of days that are grey and may have some drizzle - or even mostly mist. Pounding rain is not that common. But winter will be chilly and damp will make it feel colder.

thank you -some of your comments confirm some of the research and the results of googling -it is so reassuring to get personal comments.

One more question - are the non-private schools of good standard or problematic?

My daughter attends Killara High School in Sydney,a government school (some 1200 students) which has excellent academic results as well as plenty of other activities on offer but I am not sure what the situation is in Dublin.

I have been looking at some expat sites but they tend to be about singles or families with primary age kids

Most schools in Ireland are private, but it's not always evident, because the state pays the fees. A small number stay out of the state scheme, most usually because they have a higher budget than the state scheme would cover.

Members and aspirant members of the elite favour the fee-paying schools, as do some parents who have become frightened into believing that schools in the free-education scheme must be inferior. In general, they are not, although some schools in areas with social problems have to devote more attention to pastoral work, sometimes at the cost of covering the whole of the examination course.

I asked somebody who knows her way around the Irish education world very well if there was a website that would give you a good summary of what things are like here. She told me that she didn't think there was, but suggested that you might start here: http://www.education.ie/servlet/blob...df?language=EN