@Helse23 and
@puppylatte
I agree with what both of you are saying, which is good and bad. And Helse, I think that your stats are great. Your GPA is a bit low, but that's to be expected coming from an ivy. Just fyi, I went to a national premed conference (the UC Davis AMSA event, allegedly the largest premed conference in the world) this weekend and talked to a lot of admissions reps... most of them don't have any sympathy for you unless you're URM, received government assistance, are from an impoverished rural area, etc etc. Your MCAT is a lot better than mine, though, and you probably went to a better school, so if I were you I'd apply to allopathic US schools anyways. I really think you stand a great chance at a US MD school, but if you're considering Ireland, there's nothing wrong with it. Irish medical schools are as good as US MD schools, IMO, and it's a great experience, like you're saying.
And puppylatte, you make great points about the financial burdens of going abroad for medical school. If it helps you, my plan is to do rural primary care (or less-rural anesthesiology) and apply for loan forgiveness programs (or just make more money) that pay as much as 50 thousand per year directly to your loan originator. This doesn't affect your salary, either. The trade off is that you have to work in a rural area. But, that's what I was planning to do, anyways, so I don't really care and am happy to do it. I don't know anything about UK loan forgiveness, but several of the state loan forgiveness programs sponsor J1 visas. In fact, there are tons of FMGs at the residencies I've been talking to. Check out the AAMC website listing all loan forgiveness programs if you want:
https://services.aamc.org/fed_loan_...1&CFTOKEN=2D030AC6-DB69-F722-80BE5FE3ECAB7200
Then check out residencies in states with loan forgiveness:
https://www.residencyplace.com/PathFinder/ProgramList.aspx
You'd have to do family practice, psychiatry, internal medicine, general surgery, or ob gyn, but these programs exist and could offset not matching a higher paying specialty by compromising for working in rural Vermont, Iowa, Oregon, etc, which isn't a compromise at all, IMO. I don't want to sound too preachy, but I've been researching this stuff for a while.