Ireland is building the Celtic Interconnector with France next, will import a lot of her electricity from there which predominately uses nuclear power to generate her electricity. I fear you're making perfect the enemy of better and genuine progress.
https://www.eirgrid.ie/celticinterconnector
Ireland has lots of problems including energy generation but you're not being fair in citing significant progress having been made here.
I'm not the enemy of this progress at all and think it's a good thing. Same goes for the Celtic Interconnecter, though. My point is basically a) "coal-free" is misleading and this progress can be framed in other ways, and b) Ireland would have been better-served in terms of cost and environment to rely on even OCGTs than HFO.