WHATEVER the New Year has in store for Irish holidaymakers, you can be sure self-catering will be involved.

IT’S THE weekend, I’m scoured, showered and powdered, rightly dickied up for dinner, but I don’t quite know where to settle for my pre-prandial libation in Sandbrook House, a fine old country home built back in the early 1700s on the Carlow-Wicklow border.