CPXXX, in the last 15 years on this bbs that this question has come up, I've always noticed that Europe, then the UK, then Canada, then the USA is the typical order for price/performance ratio. I'm not including Japan or Asia, as there isn't often enough samples given. Australia seems to be somewhere in the middle of it all. For what you pay 100$ I pay the same for about 1/2 the performance, until recently, where I can pay 100$ for about 30% more performance than your current plan in Ireland, but that isn't typical, and overall your price is cheaper or equivalent to most ISP's in Canada. I was paying 129$ for 250/25 for the last couple of years, which is close to your $/speed.
Canada is usually about 20 to 25% cheaper than the USA, but it's hard to measure actual performance, as it comes down to a lot more than just rated speed - actual speeds, stability, consistency, etc, there is a lot more to it than download rates, at least for me. I'd rather have exceptionally low ping times to HTC for example than an extra 1 or 2 mb/s when downloading crap. It varies greatly, but from my time in Europe and the UK, I found that ISP's were generally as good or better than here in terms of all these things, except ping times to North America of course.
