There are practically no houses "off grid" over here. The ESB, since the days of rural electrification has a universal service obligation that means it has to connect remote homes. The usual scenario is that the ESB, homeowner and in some cases the government/local athority split the cost of running the line to a remote property.
Rural Ireland, unlike most of the rest of Europe, has a very strange population distribution. Lots of individual one off houses in the middle of the countryside varying from small traditional farmhouses to the now traditional US Style sprawling ranch sytle houses (they were very popular in the 60s). People also like to paint them very bright colours like flourecent pink, bright yellow or a nice electric blue etc. Amazingly enough it actually looks quite picturesque in most cases.
Because of this very low density distribution the ESB's rural electrification projects (1930-1950s) had to provide a very "omnipresent" network. So there are 10kV lines crisscrossing the countryside to tie into all of these scattered homes and farmhouses. If you drive around Ireland you will actually notice that there are quite a lot of quaint looking wooden pole powerlines running cross country (in comparision to the rest of Europe anyway) They're all wooden and generally quite sympathetic to the environment.
(In the northwest there are even 110kV & 220kV transmission lines on wooden poles! [installed recently wood was choosen for visual impact reasons])
Typically each home would be fed with 10kV up to the property's boundry and a pole mounted can transformer would step it back down to 220V or 380V. (nominally 230V/400V these days, but in reality it's still 220V/380V even on new installations.
The use of 10kV distribution with 38kV transmission over medium distances in the rural networks actually gives a really rubust supply that's very free from voltage fluctuations. (I've spent time in Spain and know that the rural network there wiped out my laptop power supply! We used to get flickering lights quite a lot)
