Electric Vehicles (EVs) are one of the most promising sustainable transportation solutions but require efficient refueling strategies to complete their long-distance journeys. When addressing the charging station location problem (CSLP), a well-developed network enables operators to strategically locate charging stations, efficiently mitigating range anxiety among EV drivers, and supporting the wider adoption of EVs. This study provides a description of the methodology for creating a real-world CSLP instance based on the Irish highway network and traffic count data. We capture key settlements and intersections from the Irish national road map, and construct the Irish highway network as a graph, made up of motorways, national primary roads, and national secondary roads. Applying the Lincoln MPO Travel Model, we estimate the number of EV traffic flows between all origin-destination pairs based on traffic counts on each road segment. This study evaluates the Irish highway network test instance by analyzing graph-based metrics and compares its characteristics with other widely-used CSLP instances from the literature. The results of the comparative analysis indicate that the proposed Irish highway network is a well-connected and favourable test instance to evaluate CSLP optimization models.