BUY TO LET for my own use every so often

Airbnb is the usual way to go for this scenario, but they’re trying to clamp down on it all over, can’t really see any other way to do it to be honest, similar to having a holiday home.

If you are looking for an investment and using it for your own use then it won't be a very good investment you'd be better off investing in something else.

Property prices in Ireland haven't beaten inflation over the last 20 years, they might stabilise and growth might be better in the future, in a scenario where the last crash was a one off. But you have around a third of the voters in the country who are not property owners and many of those want to crash the market so they can buy a cheap property and they are voting for a party with policies to do that. So we could well be back to the boom and bust model going forward in which case what you are talking about doing, if the last 20 years play out again, is investing in something with a return lower than long term inflation. You could also get tenants in and won't be able to ever get them out. You'd be better off putting your money on deposit at 3% at the moment - you could use the interest to rent yourself a getaway short term on airbnb or whatever.

You can only have one principal private residence, and they are clamping down on empty properties so you might have some issues down the line with using it yourself in response to your main question, regulations around renting change constantly and they are not flagged in advance or communicated clearly, in recent years they are dictated by whatever non-property owning voters want because the political parties are competing for their votes.