Do most houses in Ireland have no GAS, only electricity?

New houses? It will be common. Are gas boilers not due to be banned in new builds?

If they are not in the city then it is usually because it costs too much to install as the link to the mains would be too costly. You will find some small estates have electric only as the builder did not want to pay for the installation. I know of an estate in a town the builder set the houses up as starter homes so did not put too much into the houses. He put storage heating in and night saver meters in. Can be costly if the storage heaters are old and the house is not well insulated.

You can install oil heating or gas central heating but there will be a large tank in the back of the garden.

It is nice to have gas as you then have a choice on how to heat. If your gas boiler goes you can still have plug in heaters and immersion for the water. You can use one more than the other if gas is cheaper than electric.

Personally I prefer gas to cook and heat but you may not have a choice depending on where you buy.

Also some houses you are not allowed gas due to the design of the house.

No you don't. While chefs prefer gas, that is because they can quickly turn it on / off.

Prices depend. Having gas and electricity means paying for both installations up front. The possibility of very cheap night time electricity is much higher than the possibility of very cheap gas.

Gas use has been implicated in asthma cases.

My house was built in the early 90s with neither gas nor oil. All of the heaters are electric, but the house does have a real fire-place. I don't mind the electric heaters, but as mentioned above, if the power goes, everything stops working. Given the lunatics in charge here, I will be happy to have the fireplace in the years to come.

Most new builds will just be electricity, no gas or oil, with heat pumps.

In terms of diversifying your fuel by having both gas & electricity in the house to protect against electricity blackouts - you do know that gas boilers need electricity to operate & heat the house so that won't make a blind bit of difference in a power cut!

Having lived in houses with both gas & electricity & just electricity, I think I prefer the latter.

With something slightly beyond a normal consumer gas hob you can get temperatures that are not possible on a domestic electric hob also - an induction hob is often 7kW 30A across all four hobs, my (domestic, but not standard) gas hob has a single burner that can do 5kW on it own. Even with the loss to the air of gas versus induction; you can do much superior stir fry, searing or wok cooking on that burner.

Very much an edge case, and also not something that will be allowed new in a few years.

It depends where you are. Oil heating is pretty much unheard of here and everyone has gas. CSO puts both oil and gas at 37% each with electric heating at 12%. New builds are almost always fully electric now though so those numbers will shift over time.

Also, though we have gas heating, we have an induction hob which is far superior for cooking than any gas cooker I've used in the past. Not to mention the fact it's better for air quality in the house, safer and much easier to clean.