It's all an effin' mess, at least here in England (can't imagine Ireland being too different). In theory, if an establishment accepts cards, they should accept all 3 versions (traditional signature, chip and signature, and chip and PIN). In practice, however, the situation ranges from "sure, no problem, we can take all sorts of cards" (usually the case at tourist-friendly places like hotels), through to "umm wait I need to ask my manager how to do this" (often happens at pubs, hypermarkets, and generally places with a lot of tills and highish turnover), to "sorry, mate, our policy is to only take chip cards" (low-cost supermarkets often do this. In particular, Aldi, Lidl, and Netto all have such a policy).
If I didn't have a chip card, I'd have to miss out on a few cheap groceries, but I reckon I could still get by fine without having to carry cash around.

My advice would, therefore, be to stick to the well-known, big retailers who are all used to this type of thing.
As for airlines, it's not like one would normally ever want to fly Ryanair, so maybe it's doing her good instead.


I have quite a few actually.