We do a great deal of research concerning small and medium sized enterprises in Ireland across the finance, software and telecoms sectors in particular. One question that regularly comes up is: what are the demographics (or 'firmographics') of Irish SMEs?
There are several sources to answer this question (but no definitive one), and it is especially difficult when you try to examine Irish SMEs in an international context. However, one useful source is the recent work of the European Commission on the vexed issue of SME access to finance from banks. You can read about the Enterprise Finance Index
here (and access a large number of SME survey reports).
We culled some of the firmographic data in the charts below, which compare the profile of Irish businesses to the EU27 as a whole (from a Gallup survey for the European Commission). Taking company size first, it is clear that Irish businesses have much the same profile as the rest of the EU in terms of employee numbers. However, there are slightly more 'medium sized' businesses in Ireland when comparing turnover:

Turning to other business firmographic data, we can see in the second chart that there is a higher concentration of Irish businesses in the wholesale/retail sector than in the rest of the EU, and that significantly more Irish businesses are 5-10 years old than in the rest of the EU:

Some of these differences undoubtedly reflect the higher than average standard of living in Ireland compared to the Accession countries in particular. They also reflect the impact of the Celtic Tiger boom which saw a surge in business start ups etc at the start of the decade.