What to do with Savings

Savings rates as you probably know are poor, here's a good website to compare, if you lock it away for x number of years you will get a better rate but then sacrifice easy access to it.

https://www.bonkers.ie/compare-savings-accounts/

Another option might be to purchase Prize Bonds from the post office, no actual interest is given but the winning draws may give a better return than the banks, there's a thread on here that give people's experiences of them and returns....

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2056292513/25k-invested-in-prize-bonds/p1

Agree with the above, if you have zero tolerance for volatility and/or want your cash available at very short notice, there aren't really any options which is worth your while (you might find options with zero volatility which are slightly better than a bank deposit, but the after-tax returns will be so tiny that you will have to ask yourself if the overhead and possible additional admin work to access your cash compared to a bank deposit are worth your while).

If you have a slightly longer time horizon (at least 6 months and ideally a year), you might want to look at very defensive investment trusts such as Personal Assets Trust or Ruffer Investment Company. Those are multi-asset funds (cash, bonds, stocks, gold, etc) which are designed to protect your capital from inflation as much as possible while limiting volatility (compared to more "usual" funds, capital protection is a higher priority to them than capital appreciation). They have a good track record of delivering yields clearly above inflation , with very few occurrences of share price depreciation in any 12 months period. But since the funds are invested on financial markets, of course they can't guarantee zero volatility and for example Personal Asset Trust had a 11% drawdown during the March 2020 Covid market crash (it is a much lower drawdown than the stock market and the price fully recovered within 3 months, but had you needed the money exactly at that time it would have been a concern).

As I mentioned, those aren’t stocks-only funds. Currently PAT are holding more cash equivalent and bonds than stocks, and they also have a bit of gold.

Given the current negative real rates available to depositors, IMO staying 100% in cash or equivalent unless someone’s time horizon is at least 4 years would be a mistake for most people. Sure you are guaranteed to maintain your capital in nominal terms, but you are also guaranteed to lose purchasing power every year (with our latest inflation figures, you suffered a loss of about 5% last year - the figure could be higher or lower in a years time but what’s pretty much for sure is that adjusted for inflation cash will offer a negative return once more).