I lived in Dublin for three and a half years, that was twenty years ago. I remember I wanted to re-do my driving license there, but it was almost impossible to achieve it in a timely manner, for the same reasons you have mentioned. The waiting time for the driving exam was eight months!

Back then, the country's population had increased too fast, mostly from economic migrants, like me, who came to fill the many new jobs created in the tech industry, and the infrastructure was just not ready to cope with such an influx of new people. Everything seemed chaotic, and not to work...