> In Offaly I had to nag the hell out of builders to get them to show up, with reminder calls the day before and day of. The Latvians on the other hand arrived on time and got the job done.

Yeah fair enough that really sucks. I don't disagree that the Latvians were better, but note that there's a selection bias here. The good and responsive Irish builders are probably much more booked up, so you may end up dealing with the flaky ones while the Latvians may have less of an orderbook to work through.

Additionally Ireland (all the non-Dublin parts, at least) lost many, many building professionals after the bust so there may just not be enough people there.