Dublin driving and itinerary

Any experience driving on the left? If not then starting your learning curve in Dublin City sounds pretty ambitious. Believe that most responders to this thread would advise against it - driving in the cities can be daunting even for experienced drivers. Might at least suggest renting the car at the airport and navigating around the city on the Motorway while you get your feet wet. We found that driving on country roads was less stressful than driving anywhere in or near the cities. Just need to be prepared when you meet an approaching car head-on on a one lane road - not difficult once you get used to it. Helps that the Irish drivers are some of the most considerate we've encountered.
Having a travel partner to help with navigation will help a lot too. Was quite helpful to have another set of eyes while trying to negotiate left-handed roundabouts...guaranteed to cause brain freeze the first few times you do it. All of your muscle memory learned from years of driving in the US will be wrong - you'll really need to think ahead and anticipate situations you're likely to encounter.
Keep in mind too that the default vehicle selection will be manual transmission, so to eliminate that extra "fun factor" you should probably request automatic when you book. Will be about half again more expensive but well worth the peace of mind.

Cindy,
Just got back from Ireland 5 wks ago and we did pretty much the same trip as your planning. First, I would spend your 3 days in Dublin without a car and on the morning you want to leave take the "Aircoach bus" to the car rental places at near the airport, that way once you rent the car you will be driving on a freeway most of the way to Powerscourt (great site). A must is a GPS unit in your car!!
The signs are difficult to see, read and understand once you are off the main roads, I cannot stress this enough. Driving on the left takes a good day to master and even then it's tricky, sometimes your GPS will call a roundabout a "routery" which throws you at first. Just remember to "look right & turn left" and you will do fine.

While in Dublin make sure you get tickets for the Literary Pub Crawl, this was awesome, you can get the tickets on line to reserve your spot. Go to O'Neils pub, great food & drink, not touristy like Temple Square. We visited the Royal Botanical gardens in Dublin and loved it, nice to get away from the crowds for a couple of hours.
Toward the end of your trip when near Shannon consider going to the Medieval Banquet at Bunratty Folk park, the food is good but the music is excellent and we enjoyed this event in the Bunratty Castle as much as anything we did in Ireland.

Lastly, while in Dingle I recommend the John O'Connor tour of Dingle peninsula, it's much more fun with someone else driving and telling you about the history of the site and they know all the great photo spots and they take you to the top of Connor Pass for a amazing view of the whole area. Well worth the cost.

Thank you Robert and Donald...

That is a very helpful suggestion...going to the Dublin airport to rent a car rather than try to navigate out of the city during our maiden voyage on the left. We will be going with another couple and the guys will share the driving and be each others copilot/navigator. We will for sure be renting an automatic!

I will also check into those other recommendations.

One thing that helped me (a lot) on our last trip to Ireland was looking at Google Street Map views and previewing my daily routes in advance. The feature allows you to see, in pretty amazing detail, what the road is going to look like as you approach turnoffs, intersections, roundabouts, etc. I must have looked at the route out of the airport and onto the Motorway about a dozen times before our trip just to ensure I knew where I was supposed to be going, could anticipate lane changes for exit ramps, etc. I was happily surprised that comparatively minor roads and rural lanes were available to view as well. Case in point: Our first destination was a small, remote thatched cottage near the village of Ardgroom. Using the owner's directions (which included the memorable "turn right at the Monkey Puzzle Tree just outside the village") I was able to "drive" the route in advance, noting signage, viewing the roundabouts...and even found the Monkey Puzzle tree!
It was a real stress reliever for me - might work for you too.

You sound a lot like me! I've done this for every one of our trips to Europe, albeit usually the walking route from a train station to our apartment, etc. This will be our first driving experience in Europe. We will for sure being viewing the street view map over and over again.

There's a Hertz rental office on the south side of Dublin (151 S Circular Rd) with easy access to the Wicklow mountains. There are a few left and right turns to get out of town but no heavy city traffic and soon enough we were on the Old Military Road looking at sheep.

Your co-pilot's one job is to say "LEFT!" at every turn, particularly the left turns. :-)