Pension help for a clueless couple

If it's relevant, we are aged 43 & 41, have a mortgage free house & 2 kids 12 & 9. I earn about 30k & spouse about 60k/yr. We're comfortably off but have pretty much ignored financial stuff other than buying houses to live in.

We need to get real & start sorting out PRSAs (I think) but we're clueless! Really struggling to understand how it works and what to do.

Neither of us has any employer scheme and both of us earn a combination of PAYE and self employed income.

Main question is, is a PRSA each the best thing and if so how do we open PRSA? Are we stuck with broker fees or can we do it direct somehow?

Also, we are keen that any money be ethically invested and this would be a huge priority for us but can't see much like that on offer. Maybe we don't know how to find it?

Is there some way to share tax free amounts between us as our incomes differ a good bit?

Less important but we lived in Australia for 10 years and each have about 100k Australian in accounts from the compulsory scheme there. We're back about 5 years now and we never really thought about this money or whether it's best to transfer it here or leave it there, so it's been left there by default. We have the right but probably won't move back there again as we're happily settled back here now. Not sure what the tax implications are but from a quick google search the fees etc seem more regulated & lower there? Plus the money is in very ethical funds which we're happy with.

Really any thoughts from pension heads would be very much appreciated. We are not sure what to do at all and it's soooo tempting just to keep ignoring it in the too hard basket.

Paying a good financial adviser will easily cover the cost of doing so by avoiding mistakes.

it’s generally not a good idea to try and DIY retirement planning.

you should start by obtaining an up to date Irish state pension forecast as you have a gap in your contribution record due to the time in Australia.

setting up an ethical pension is very simple and and effective way of saving tax efficiently.

you should both aim to have a pension in retirement as you will both have income tax exemptions resulting in less tax on payments but if you are jointly assessed makes no difference to the tax relief now.

Don't go direct to a PRSA provider. They will charge the full rates i.e. 1% annual management charge and an allocation rate of 95%. If you search the askaboutmoney site you will find brokers that charge 1% annual management charge but have a 100% allocation rate. This will save you 5% on all premiums paid into your PRSA. If you are jointly assessed for tax any PRSA payments will get tax relief at your joint marginal rate. This means that both of you could get tax relief at 40%.