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Be careful when booking holiday accommodation in Ireland, says Edel Morgan.

I'VE DISCOVERED that when taking small children on holiday to a rented house, it's a mistake not to interrogate the booking agent or owner regarding the suitability of the accommodation beforehand.

There are so many self-catering beds in Ireland competing for a reduced pool of holiday makers that if you don't ask the relevant questions, they may just forget to mention that the property sits right on a busy road or has so many stairs that even an experienced mountaineer might baulk at the challenge.

When we booked the gate lodge of a large country house in the south of Ireland for a week, we got slightly carried away by the romance of spending time in a 19th century gatehouse in an idyllic setting.

We asked routine questions about high chairs and cots and relied on them to enlighten us about any precarious quirks of the property. In hindsight we should have demanded full and frank disclosure regarding the lay-out, its orientation and its precise location in relation to the main road. A tad extreme? No, as it turned out.

This was the type of gate lodge built either side of an arched entrance to the main house. To get to the kitchen, on one side of the arch from the livingroom on the other, was an expedition involving two steep flights of stairs and a stepped landing.

The kitchen, although full of character, had a cold stone floor and was eerily dark. The livingroom was equally light-starved, although an attempt was made to brighten it up with colourful fabrics. As each room had a front door onto the street, you could take a short cut between the rooms by going out onto the footpath - but as the lodge was perched on a busy road this wasn't an option for us with toddlers. The owners supplied stair gates for the bottom of each staircase but, as the landing was so wide, they couldn't be fitted to the top, which was a constant worry.

The next day when we went up to the big house to explore its gardens we were apprehended at the top of the driveway by an employee of the house who ushered us around the side so we wouldn't disturb a German film crew making a love story for television (which, funnily enough, was never mentioned when we were booking the lodge).

All over the house were guests with their noses pressed up against windows looking out at the action but forbidden to enter the front gardens. In reception I overheard a female guest being told to back away from the door because her white jumper was distracting the crew. Later, a staff member told me that, had she taken our booking, she would have told us the lodge was unsuitable for children.

The next day we decided to leave the lodge and move on. As well as our safety concerns, the weather forecast was for rain and the prospect of being stuck in a dark sittingroom for a week apart from the occasional epic journey to the kitchen didn't appeal. On a day trip to Glengariff we viewed a few holiday homes, each one as bleak, bare and depressing as the next with not even a rug on the floor and furniture that was skip quality, all asking for more than €400 for five nights (a bit shortsighted perhaps given that tourists were like hen's teeth?).

In the Irish climate with small children, it helps if the accommodation is bright and pleasant because it's likely you will be spending a lot of time there. Eventually we went online and found a high spec apartment complex at one end of the main street in Killarney for €495. When we left the gate lodge we were charged €280 for two nights (amounting to €90 a night plus retention of our €100 deposit) and the pleasure of being bossed about by a film crew and we never really got to see the gardens. Some might argue we were lucky not to be charged the full €500 but the question remains should they have let it to us in the first place?