Like others on the thread I get this stuff free-to-air. I recently dumped Virgin Media as it didn't really give me any content I wanted that I couldn't get for free. I already had a satellite dish from a previous Sky installation and bought a simple indoor Saorview aerial for digital terrestrial. I initially used an old Sky box for satellite, but the user interface without a subscription isn't great -- you have to manually tune certain channels and access them differently to the rest. In any case I already had a couple of LG televisions which also had both satellite and terrestrial tuners. However, I didn't like the user interface to those either, so I finally settled on a Ferguson Ariva combo box (about €100) with satellite and terrestrial tuners and a decent user interface compared to the other options. It also supports live pause/replay and recording to an external hard disk.
The main limitations compared to a Sky or Virgin Media subscription is the more limited EPG ("now and next" on satellite and 7-day on Saorview), also you cannot record several channels simultaneously while watching another as with VM Horizon. That doesn't bother me in the slightest as I am getting much more of my video content over the internet than before -- I kept the Virgin Media broadband. I could almost live without Saorview altogether as the only Irish content I watch is the odd news bulletin on RTE News Now. On the satellite side I have all the BBC and ITV channels, including BBC NI and UTV, BBC News in HD (which it isn't on Virgin Media -- in fact there are more HD channels on free-to-air than on VM). Also have Film 4 and various other movie channels, and lots of "plus one" channels (really missed Channel 4+1 for the news, which Sky had but VM did not). I trimmed the 500+ available satellite channels down to a couple of dozen that I would ever watch, and set them up across several "favourites" menus on the Ferguson box.
Will definitely never pay for subscription TV again.