Make sure all your Aer Lingus flights have posted to your account. Seems like you should have more avios if the price range you quote for your flights is correct with 3 avios per dollar spent (however not all your fare will earn avios, it excludes taxes and fees etc).

In general using avios to reduce your fare at point of sale is a very poor use of avios in terms of getting best value for them. Your best bet is to try to accumulate more and spend them to redeem a flight using avios.com (you can get off peak return ticket for 26K avios but you will still need to pay a cash component which could be a couple hundred dollars) or upgrade a flight to business class or even redeem for a hotel stay.

It sounds as if you are based in the US (as you are quoting dollar prices despite indicating you are starting your trips in DUB), if so an alternative use of avios would be to redeem american airlines domestic flights using a british airways executive club account. If you open a BA accoutn using the same details as your AerClub account (personal details, email, address etc) then you can freely transfer your avios to BA (which also used avios) and redeem flights with any airline in the Oneworld network (such as AA). There used to be very good value on domestic AA flights using avios on BA however recently I believe it has gotten worse....
Unfortunately airlines profit by making it hard to get good value for your 'miles' (or to use them at all in some cases!) and it can be surprisingly complex to utilise them. If you are interested a website such as www.headforpoints.com is a useful resource on how to maximise your use of avios, especially if you expect to be flying more frequently.