The history of the telecommunications network over here is a little different.
There were some SxS exchanges in the old P&T network but as far as I'm aware they were confined to local switching and would have been of a very old vintage dating back to the 1930s. There were definitely a few in Dublin and possibily in Cork etc.
Ericsson ARK and ARF crossbar systems seem have made up most of the network in the 60s and 70s though. I don't think we ever had any electronic (non-digital) switches.
The upgrade to digital appears to have followed this route:
SxS, any remaining manual and other switches went straight to Alcatel E10 digital switching in the early to mid 1980's
Ericsson ARF switches seem to have had an upgrade path to AXE digital switching so sites that were ARF seem mostly now to be AXE.
It works out that 50% of the exchanges are Alcatel E10 based and 50% are Ericsson AXE 10 based.
As for the backbone of the network I'm not 100% sure what's used for major trunk switching although I know that they only use Ericsson and Alcatel switches. Recently eircom has invested pretty heavily in "Ericsson Engine" . VPN, 1800 etc and Chargecard is all AXE based.
As for STD it was available for many years between major population centres but some very remote spots would have gone straight from manual switching to AXE or E10 in the early 80s so I guess that 100% nationwide STD didn't become available until then.
If you look around the countryside here you'll see small prefabricated green containers with airconditioning units on top (usually near a post office). They contain an Alcatel E10B that would have replaced manual switching directly!!
The Alcatel E10 (identical to most of France Telecom's network) and Ericsson AXE switches have been pretty heavily modified and upgraded over the years so they're still pretty much cutting edge and provide the full raft of services.
