I will say this about Ireland. The situation has improved somewhat over a couple of decades ago when Ireland essentially introduced this cancer to the travelling world. In most cases, now, merchants ask if you wish to pay in dollars (assuming you have a USA denominated card) or euro. Sometimes, people ask which is better and I've heard clerk respond with things like well you can lock in the rate. But for the most part, they do ask today (and of course there is not a big language problem in Ireland with residents from the USA or actually there might be).

I brought up the Burger King thing from a few years ago. Now I don't know if this was a corporte policy. The so called manager was a year or two older than the clerk. Neither wa Irish. One seemed to be from Rumania and her English was not all that great (remember eu regulations mandate that any citizen of the eu can work in any other eu country, something you see more and more in Ireland and England causing language problems even for people such as myself totally fluent in English; they're not). In any event, she said when I said that pulling the dcc scam was contrary to mc regulations, she answered me maybe in the USA but not in Ireland. Of course she was some low level stooge who probably didn't have a clue as to what she was talking about.

But like I said, that was really an exception. Ireland had received a lot of bad publicity about this and I sense the Irish Tourst Board has had something to say about this.