The measure of Ireland

One of the first things I noticed not long after I moved to Ireland was the way people here in the IT industry tried to put the market in perspective by comparing it to a UK (well, English) city, usually Manchester or Birmingham.

I remember how surprised I was when I first heard someone say the whole Irish market was about the same size as Manchester’s. I was probably confused by the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, Manchester did not have two broadline distributors and more than 1,000 resellers covering it. The same goes for Birmingham.

The other thing, of course, is that neither Manchester nor Birmingham has a population of 4.6 million spread across an area of 81,688.1 square kilometres. While the population of Birmingham is just over 1 million, the total number for West Midland County metropolitan area is 2.64 million. But when it comes to the area, well that’s a very different number indeed at 902 square kilometres. As for Manchester, the city’s population is a mere 498,800 people but it rises to 2.6 million for Greater Manchester and an area of 1,277 square kilometres.

Now the thing to bear in mind here is that the people making the comparisons to these English cities are normally people in Ireland. I think they’re merely trying to make it easier for companies from the UK or US businesses in the UK to get an idea of the size of the Irish market. From a population perspective, they’re not that far off, but when it comes to area well, they’re miles away from it, literally (or should that be numerically).

Of course, this can work to their advantage. For instance, if you’re an Irish distributor trying to convince a vendor based in the UK that it only needs one distribution partner in Ireland (and that’s you), you can see how getting that vendor to visualise the Irish market as not much more than a Manchester or Birmingham might serve to dissuade it from adding another partner. If they knew the area was nearly 80 times larger and there were 1,000 resellers or more to service, they might be inclined to take a different view.

Personally-and this isn’t just because I’m from the country itself-I wonder if it might make more sense to draw a comparison with Scotland. It’s not so far away from London, Basingstoke or the South of England that companies based there won’t be able to understand the comparison (or is it?). Plus, it makes much more sense in terms of population and area (and the terrain is pretty similar too). Scotland has a population of around 5.2 million people and an area of 78,387 square kilometres (a difference of a mere 3,301.1 square kilometres – or just over three West Midland Counties or two and a half Greater Manchesters).

And when it comes to numbers, the similarities don’t end there. According to figures from the Scottish government, there are just over 1700 SMEs with 0-49 employees in the computing sector in Scotland. I don’t think that’s too far off the numbers here. So here’s my proposal for the future: instead of measuring Ireland against a Manchester or Birmingham, why don’t we use a Scotland instead?

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