Targeting multiple countries

Hey Guys, Have a new client, they`re quite big - targeting multiple countries etc. Anyway, I`ve noticed that they are insistent on having specific URLs for the targeted countries. This is causing a problem for 2 in particular - UK and Ireland, as it is creating duplicate content. The uk and irish site are exactly the same in terms of content. The .com is automatically redirected to the below. The URLs look like this; *www.domain.com/uk-en/ *www.domain.com/ie-en/ They seem adamant on keeping them this way. I should point out that at present there are no canonical tags on the site or hreflang tags, so that was going to be my recommendation anyway. From what I gather, the canonical tags wont stop the duplicate content because the URLs are permanently redirected to country specific URLs every time. Is this true? Or do you have better advice? Thanks.