Hi SCurry
My tuppence (as a civil servant)
I would look into the Department and the office you are likely to be employed in in a bit more detail. You are clearly an intelligent person and ambitious person. If you were in Dublin or Cork, I would tell you to go for it, as even if you ended up in a job and an office that you weren't happy in, you could maximise the positive bits for a few years (time with kids, perhaps opportunities to study for further or different qualifications that would be financially covered by your Department) and hopefully get a promotion a few years down the line into another Department or office. However, it sounds as though you are in or near a small town with one particular office and not really in a position to move. I would be very careful in that circumstance. Most of the civil service is fine - fewer and fewer dead end jobs and old fashioned attitudes to work. But its not uniformly positive and offices outside the main cities can be sometimes end up being backwaters with very little innovation and a very negative work ethic. I'm saying this as a civil servant who really likes their job and feels there is a lot of scope for pursuing improvements, inputting into policy, making a positive difference and progressing my career, so I am as far from 'civil servants are all lazy and do nothing and I wouldn't work there if you paid me double' as it gets (ironically, given your reasons for wanting to accept a CS job, the only thing I don't like is that things are so busy that I am rarely home before 7, so don't get as much time with my children as I would like!). I would think hard about whether you are willing to move from where you are over time as promotion opportunities come up. If you are going into a small office, promotion opportunities may be rare so you'd realistically be looking at open or inter-departmental competitions, either generalist or specialist, if you want to move reasonably fast and that does require mobility.