Smaller public companies have found the going tough for some time now in securing investor interest in the era of EMU and dot coms. Now, even their larger peers are discovering what life on the stock market ropes is like.

The plight of the banks is well-known but others among the leaders on the Irish Stock Exchange list are suffering too. This week, both Smurfit and CRH, two of the industrial heavyweights, found it difficult to boost their share prices despite market approval for earnings-enhancing acquisitions in North America.

It must have been all the more galling for their executives to read on the same day news that two of the rising stars of the upstart technology sector - Horizon and Orbis - had no trouble placing significant amounts of stock to raise funds for future growth.