💡 From Classroom to Unicorn

Céad míle fáilte!

My name is Eoghan O’Connor and if you read last week’s newsletter you might have seen that I recently joined the irish insights team! I’m 27, based in London, but originally from Dublin. I’m super excited to be involved in the newsletter. This is my first post and it’s a bit of a hot take!

A post by Kerry man Niall Harty of All Real Nutrition brought me back to the school desks this week, where he shared a Leaving Cert-style exam question about his company:

For plenty, that kind of thing is a nightmare flashback. But for me (and, I’d bet, plenty of you), it stirred up fond memories of breakeven analysis and learning about Local Enterprise grants in Business class. But it also reminded me how much business is baked into Irish schooling.

Most of my mates did some form of business subject for their leaving cert. Almost everyone did Business at Junior Cert which gave you a foundational knowledge of Economics and Accounting as well.

It got me wondering, are we just a nation of business nerds in training? Or is there something special about how Ireland teaches teenagers the ABCs of the P&L?

The Numbers Don’t Lie 1️⃣2️⃣3️⃣

🇮🇪 Ireland: In 2021, nearly 30% of Leaving Cert students sat Business, another 14% did Accounting, and 9% took Economics. That’s close to 50% of Irish teens finishing school with some kind of business education. (Some double counting in there).

🇬🇧 UK: In 2024, just 5% of A-Level students took Business Studies, and less than 10% combined did Business or Economics. Plus, more than half of UK state schools don’t even offer Economics.

It’s not just a little difference – it’s a gulf. While UK teens specialise early in just three or four A-Levels, Irish students slog through six or seven subjects, meaning even your future neurosurgeon or coder has probably spent time scribbling out SWOT analyses.

Across the EU? The data is messy, but Ireland is clearly an outlier. Spanish and Italian teens are funnelled down narrow “science vs. humanities” tracks. Business just isn’t as embedded.

Built Into the System 🌳

This didn’t happen by accident. Since the 1980s, Irish policymakers have deliberately made business education core to the curriculum.

By Junior Cycle (ages 12–15), kids are already learning about Personal Finance, Enterprise, and Our Economy. Transition Year adds mini-companies and Dragon’s Den-style projects. By the Leaving Cert, you’ve been steeped in business thinking whether you like it or not.

And the ecosystem reinforces it:

• Student Enterprise Programme: 30,000+ participants each year, 450,000 since 2003.

• BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition: where half the projects now end up as startups or spinouts.

• Teacher networks: Ireland’s Business Studies Teachers’ Association is one of the largest professional communities in education.

It’s not about producing accountants (though plenty emerge) it’s about building entrepreneurial muscle memory.

In January 2005, 16-year-old Patrick Collison, then attending Castletroy College, Limerick, won the BT Young Scientist of the Year prize with his project CROMA, a new LISP-style programming language:

A Strategic Advantage 🎯

Here’s the kicker: by university, the numbers even out. Roughly 20% of Irish and UK students study business degrees. But Irish students from other fields – engineering, medicine, design – still carry that Leaving Cert business literacy into their careers.

That’s why you get engineers who think like founders and doctors who spin up medtech companies. It’s why Ireland consistently ranks as a “Strong Innovator” in the EU, with above-average scores in sales of innovations and knowledge-intensive services exports.

This foundation also shows up in the diaspora. Irish VCs in London or San Francisco often talk about their school enterprise projects as much as their MBAs.

The All Real Case Study 📋

Back to Niall Harty. His All Real Nutrition started on a kitchen table in Kerry in 2017. It’s now in 2,000 stores across Ireland and the US, with €2m in new investment and 50 jobs coming down the line. Oh, and the wrappers? 100% compostable, preventing millions of plastic bottles entering the ocean.

That’s the modern Irish founder: grounded in the fundamentals, scaling globally, and adding social impact on top.

A great case study for all young Irish students to learn about.

 Final Thought 🧠

The Leaving Cert gets a lot of stick and rightly so. But hidden in the rote learning and exam stress is something quietly powerful: an entire population trained young to think commercially.

The next Intercom, Stripe, or All Real isn’t just incubating in a startup hub. It’s probably sitting in a fifth-year classroom right now, half-asleep after lunch, drawing up a breakeven chart.

🔗 Share irish insights

Copy and paste this link to others:

https://www.irish-insights.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER