It was hard enough to drag them into the 20th century.

This was due to the usual ccTLD problem of academics trying to run the ccTLD and having absolutely no clue how to do it. Luckily, a lot has changed in the last few years and the academic stranglehold has been broken to some extent.
There was a review of .ie ccTLD last year and the industry was consulted over the future of .ie ccTLD. Some people want a more open ccTLD but the ccTLD has been managed since its inception. The big attraction of .ie has been the quality of registrations in that a .ie domain is less likely to be a speculative registration (due to the costs and difficulty of registering a .ie domain) and more likely to be a genuine Irish business (again due to the Irish-centric nature of registations). An unrestricted subdomain might be a good thing.
Regards...jmcc