What I allways do when playing Ireland is save up for a CoT 
With the current HTTT defines that's easy enough to do early on and gives you a nice edge vs the English.
Apart from this annexing all the Irish minors as soon as possible is good advice (atleast one of them deserve a day 1 dow) and hope England doesn't get conquer Ireland as their first mission. I also tend to use lots of mercenaries (funded by the cot) to make up for pittifull manpower).
Now I'm not sure if this was good advice or not as I didn't have time to read your post But it does tend to work well every time for me.
The real trouble starts after formation imho when England will get their annex ireland mission and invade with 20+ stacks. These need to be decimated at all cost an alliance with Scotland or France might be a lot of help as well. In order to survive as Ireland one pretty much have to break England early on imho. This is unfortunate as I'd rather compete with them for a colonial empire myself but their oft-repeated annex Ireland mission kills coexistence as a viable option.
With the current HTTT defines that's easy enough to do early on and gives you a nice edge vs the English.Apart from this annexing all the Irish minors as soon as possible is good advice (atleast one of them deserve a day 1 dow) and hope England doesn't get conquer Ireland as their first mission. I also tend to use lots of mercenaries (funded by the cot) to make up for pittifull manpower).
Now I'm not sure if this was good advice or not as I didn't have time to read your post
But it does tend to work well every time for me.The real trouble starts after formation imho when England will get their annex ireland mission and invade with 20+ stacks. These need to be decimated at all cost an alliance with Scotland or France might be a lot of help as well. In order to survive as Ireland one pretty much have to break England early on imho. This is unfortunate as I'd rather compete with them for a colonial empire myself but their oft-repeated annex Ireland mission kills coexistence as a viable option.