+1 against CEH (sorry), they've deservedly come in for a lot of crap recently and it's not respected by those in the know.
Re. Sans Certs, they're excellent but yep, they're definitely very pricey. They've run a few over the years (GCIA, GSEC & GCIH) in Dublin but attendances began to dwindle because they're so pricey. Some of the instructors are unbelievably good though. AFAIK, Bob McArdle has tried to run the GCIH SEC504 mentor course in 2010 and 2011, in Dublin, but never had enough attendees.
Regarding CISSP, I know a lot of folk that have it but it was never for me, I wanted something more practical. CISSP is required on well over 90% of infosec jobs that I've seen and gives a very good broad knowledge afaik and some good folk (such as Wim Remes) have recently been elected to the board so I'm hopeful that ISC2 will improve from here.
Owasp do web app training at their annual conference in Dublin afaik and Sans do two web-app courses (SEC542 and SEC642) with the latter being a new addition and considered 'advanced'.
OCSE and OCSP are rated very highly and are purely practical.
The problem I see is that once you get these certs/qualifications, you end up being a lot more knowledgeable and better than many of the current pen testers out there (who quite often don't know more than how to run Nessus) and the pen testing business in Ireland is generally tied up amongst a few companies (imho) with no room for others. To be honest, for interesting pen testing work, I suspect you'll be looking outside of Ireland (though I may be mistaken).
Here's a blog I did with @securityninja on education/learning in the infosec industry that you "might" find interesting

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http://www.securityninja.co.uk/appli...-from-markofu/. HTH!
Disclaimer: I am a fan of Sans, have spent a fortune on certs there (
http://blog.markofu.com/2012/04/doing-gse.html) and write questions for GIAC so I am biased (don't hold that against me)!