The more the capital declines into gridlock city, the more people are looking for a way of getting away from it for the weekend.
But, where do you head to, for that relaxing and romantic couple of days, where the food will be good and the decor stylish and the welcome true and hospitable?
Where, in short, will you find a little republic of pleasure, someplace where the alliance of style and design, cooking and atmosphere mean that you can shut off the system, away from the traffic, the kids, the pressures of Monday to Friday?
The places mustn't be too far away from Dublin, and they should be fairly close to the major routes, so that you don't have to meander for four hours and arrive finally at 10.30 p.m., utterly exhausted and thinking you will have to face the same drive again late on Sunday.
The following is a selection of places which fit the bill. They vary in style and in price, and in levels of service offered, but they are all places where, I believe, people do their very best to make you feel welcome, and to help you to relax.
Some of them are already established as great favourites for Dubliners fleeing the city; others are places I think will prove very suitable.
There are, of course, many more houses which would be suitable for long weekends, but I have tried here to stick to those which are easily accessible from the major thoroughfares.
Tonlegee House
`In the autumn and the winter, we can have all nine of our rooms full and everyone eating in the dining room, and they will all be people who have driven down from Dublin for the weekend," says Marjorie Molloy. With her husband Mark taking care of the pots and pans with an understated expertise, the Molloys form one of the great double acts in the country, seeming to find little difficulty in running a country house alongside rearing three small children. Meanwhile, many of their customers at weekends are fleeing from their own little darlings: "There are many couples where granny is giving the parents a break by looking after the kids for two nights, and this is their chance to get away. They can be here in about an hour, driving from Dublin, and that is a big bonus." The combination of Mrs Molloy's effortless hospitality and care and Mr Molloy's expressive and impressive cooking - grilled goat's cheese with a salad of roast aubergines, peppers and rocket; warm pigeon salad with bacon, pinenuts and a sherry vinegar sauce; roast sea bass with garlic potato puree, fillet of beef with spinach, flat cap mushrooms and a Roquefort sauce - along with its proximity to Dublin and its keen prices, means Tonlegee hits all the right spots.
Tonlegee House, Athy, Co Kildare, tel: (0507) 31473, B & B £35, dinner from £22. Signposted just outside Athy on the road to Kilkenny.
Kilgraney Country House
People don't just love Kilgraney. They adopt it. For many Dublin residents, the house has become the ultimate home-away-from-home, the place where you and a gaggle of friends all pile off to on a Friday evening for a weekend house party. It's a cult address.
Bryan Leech and Martin Marley's house is sober looking from the outside, but inside the decoration is whacky and choice, and superbly comfortable. Furnishings and pieces collected from travels all over the globe have been brought back to Bagenalstown, and they make for an interior which is very playful, and very knowing, full of irony and amusement.
Bryan Leech's cooking, then, completes the equation in this republic of pleasure. He concentrates on a repertoire of dishes - chicken is stuffed with chorizo sausage, or perhaps Westphalian ham, or is maybe served with a north African vegetable stew. Slaney salmon will be wrapped in nori and flavoured with wasabi and (just to show how hip he is) Leech will serve it with pickled ginger and coriander sauce vierge, the fashionable sauce of the moment. Duck salad features home-smoked duck, new season lamb is served with an olive and caper scented jus. Desserts are dreamy: date and walnut cake with prune and Armagnac ice cream; chocolate creme brulee; orange cake with orange and rosemary sorbet. Expect a serious party to break out at any moment.
Kilgraney Country House, Bagenalstown, Co Carlow tel: (0503) 75283, B&B £30£35, dinner £22, communal table. To be found 3 1/2 miles from Bagenalstown heading towards Borris.
Temple
Temple is the house where you can have your cake, and eat it. It's practically adjacent to the main Dublin-Galway road, between Horseleap and Moate, but once you get up that driveway, you seem to be a million miles from anywhere. And aside from the away-from-it-all ambience, and the special character of the house, you are here to enjoy Bernadette Fagan's deliciously flavourful cooking, and meanwhile, Fagan keeps an eye on the calories for you, so that you can blow-out with a clear conscience - and without, in fact, blowing out at all: spinach and lentil roulade, and basil and courgette quiche are just two of the healthy specialities, but Bernadette Fagan also knows how to cook Westmeath beef just the way it should be. "I had a group of ladies down recently for the weekend, for a get-together," says Fagan, "and they just didn't want to leave." Who would?
Happily, a new Temple Spa, with five en-suite rooms and a sauna, steam room, hydrotherapy bath and massage and beauty rooms, has just opened, adding to the house's three rooms, so it is now easier to join those Dubliners who already worship at the altar of Temple.
Temple, Horseleap, Moate, Co Westmeath tel: (0506) 35118, B & B £30, dinner £18, communal table, aromatherapy, ki-massage, reflexology £30 an hour by appointment, weekend relaxation programmes, prices on application. Half a mile off the N6, 1 mile west of Horseleap.
Dunbrody Country House
Dunbrody may be a little distant from the capital for some people - you will have to drive 100 miles to get to Arthurstown in Co Wexford, though the road is good and getting better - but it is fascinating to see this work-in-progress, as Kevin and Catherine Dundon set about transforming this grand old house.
Kevin Dundon was chef in The Side Door at the Shelbourne Hotel, after he returned from working in Canada, and before he headed south to Wexford, and he can cook a dish of hickory-smoked salmon with a maple beurre blanc which is absolutely thunderous with flavour. Catherine Dundon, meanwhile, is assured and expert, and the scale of the challenge they have set themselves doesn't seem to trouble them one bit. They are relishing it.
For the Dundons are in the process of learning that in order to run a country house hotel, one needs to acquire a myriad skills. You must be gardener and grower, as well as chef. You must be interior designer and decorator, as well as greeter.
What the Dundons should do over time is to lock the house more firmly into its locality. I would like to see them exhibiting works by local painters on the walls instead of prints, for instance, and depending completely on their own bread, and I look forward to the time when they can offer foods from the beds they are preparing in the garden and so present the flavours of the Sunny South-East.
Dunbrody Country House, Arthurstown, Co Wexford tel: (051) 389600, B & B from £45, dinner £20. From the Wexford bypass take the R733 signposted to Wellington Bridge. Dunbrody house is on the left as you go down the hill into Arthurstown.
Crookedwood House
Noel and Julie Kenny bought the old parish rectory that was Crookedwood and turned it into a restaurant, a fine home for Mr Kenny's flavourful cooking - baked crabmeat chardonnay with fresh tagliatelle; rib of beef on the bone with horseradish; duet of venison and wild duck with juniper berries; noisettes of lamb with a kohlrabi puree. A couple of years back they built on eight en-suite rooms, which perfectly complemented the house, the rooms being very comfortable and spacious. This year, they have opened a new B&B, Clonkill House, a few miles from Crookedwood, and from here they operate a taxi service for those who are coming to dinner. The Kennys' understated professionalism and efficiency, and the lovely country cooking, offers just the right style from which to discover more of this overlooked part of the Midlands.
Crookedwood House, Mullingar, Co Westmeath tel: (044) 72165 B&B £40£50, dinner £23, Clonkill House B&B £30£35. Take the third exit from the Mullingar bypass, signposted Castlepollard. Drive to Crookedwood village, turn right at the Wood pub, and drive for 1.5 miles.
Rathsallagh House
Joe and Kay O'Flynn's grand house is another of those places which has devotees rather than customers, and it has long had a busy weekend trade of Dubliners who head down into lovely rural Wicklow and the capacious embrace of Rathsallagh and its gorgeous grounds. The key to its successful chillout factor is undoubtedly the laidback, forget-about-tomorrow ambience, and the generosity of the food and its easy accessibility. As with all the best such places, Rathsallagh can feel like another world: I will never forget walking around the mist-swollen grounds early one autumn morning, when the house seemed to offer a mix of Tuscany with the lushness of Wicklow, as lazy game-birds lolloped around the place.
Rathsallagh House, Dunlavin, Co Wicklow tel; (045) 403112, B & B £55£95, dinner £30£35. Signposted from Dunlavin village, one hour from Dublin.
Tinakilly House Hotel
For those who want all the services of a hotel within the style of a country house, Tinakilly is hard to beat. It is an epitome of professionalism, with Bill Power directing his staff with confidence as the hotel has steadily grown over the years, and with John Moloney's zestful, delicious cooking forming a backbone to the idyll of the hotel.
John Moloney has been working at the stove in Tinakilly since 1989, a pair of lifetimes for a hotel chef. His style is elegant but straightforward - wild mushroom tart; pheasant with celeriac puree; chicken with fried leeks and walnut sauce; loin of lamb with a potato and leek galette. Sunday morning breakfast in bed is a special treat, and Tinakilly, all told, is a hotel run just the way hotels should be.
Tinakilly House Hotel, Rathnew, Co Wicklow tel: (0404) 69274, B & B £60£85, dinner £30. Just 500 yards past Rathnew village heading towards Wicklow town.
Buggy's Glencairn Inn
There are now five rooms in Ken and Cathleen Buggy's wonderful pub-cum-restaurant-cum-place-to-stay, and they all enjoy Ken Buggy's inimitable, eclectic decorative style. The rooms are small, and packed pellmell with all manner of stuff - big, high brass beds, old radios and chests, prints and paintings and cartoons and mirrors - and their combined effect is to make you want to switch off the world and submerge in the quiescent glory of west Waterford. The bar is even nicer - this is my idea of the pub in Heaven - and the cooking is stunning. No one else can make a halibut steak and a big bowl of homemade fries so delicious, no one else makes a casserole of beef and vegetables Provencale so rich and satisfying. The perfect house for the perfect weekend.
Buggy's Glencairn Inn, Glencairn, Co Waterford tel: (058) 56232, B & B £28£30, dinner £16-£20. In Lismore, turn right at the monument and drive to Horneybrooks garage where you will see the signs for Glencairn, three miles further.
Cromleach Lodge Country House
`We find we have weekend visitors from Galway as well as Dublin", says Moira Tighe of Sligo's Cromleach Lodge, "although our Dublin trade is easily the biggest." Northerners have also discovered Cromleach Lodge, set amid the beautiful rolling landscapes around Lough Arrow, which have always seemed to me to be timeless. Not surprisingly, many weekenders like to walk around the area, which is rich in archaeological sites, while others prefer to play golf on one of the four adjacent golf courses. But for me it is Moira Tighe's cooking which is the lynchpin of Cromleach - spirited, very feminine and meticulous. This kitchen can produce knock-out food - confit of duck with a crispy potato galette; the classic sausage of chicken mousse on a carrot and sauternes sauce; wild salmon with creamed spring onions - none more so than their legendary desserts: iced pineapple souffle; banana and chocolate mousse; terrine of two chocolates with pistachio sauce; florentina cornet of marinated tropical fruits.
The weekenders tend to pay a little more for the superior rooms for their couple of days chilling out, and the rooms are marvellously spacious and charming.
Cromleach Lodge Country House, Ballindoon, Boyle, Co Sligo tel: (071) 65155, B & B £69-£89pps, dinner £25-£35. Two hours from Dublin on the N4, and signposted from Castlebaldwin.