The places we have written for, and why.

Meath, Kildare and Wicklow — where a great many firms serve Dublin clients from a town those clients can drive to and park in.

Wexford, Kilkenny and Carlow, where business has historically been won on a reputation that everybody local already knows and nobody has ever had to write down.

Donegal, Sligo, Leitrim, Cavan, Monaghan and Louth, where a haulier, a builder or an accountant may cross a jurisdiction before lunch and where the two sides of that border have different law, different tax and different regulators with confusingly similar jobs.

The county where most of the questions that matter to a business are typed by somebody who does not live there and will not be there long — a visitor deciding, days or hours ahead, where to eat, stay or get something fixed.

Laois, Offaly, Westmeath and Longford, where the motorway has made the catchment of a good firm several counties wide and made "near me" close to meaningless — a customer half an hour from three towns is choosing between them on what they can find out, not on distance.

The market where an Irish firm competes for a buyer's attention with the European offices of companies that are not Irish at all, and where an assistant asked a Dublin question will happily answer it with a London practice — the language matches, so nothing in the query flags the jurisdiction as wrong.

A professional market with its own institutions, its own firms and a well-earned impatience with being treated as a branch of Dublin — a buyer here who asks for a Cork solicitor and is offered a Dublin practice with a Cork address notices in the first line.

Two client bases sharing one small city: medical-device and life-science companies whose work does not vary from month to month, and a hospitality trade whose year is decided in a handful of weeks.

Shannon on the doorstep has given the city a professional market used to contracts with an international counterparty, which is unusual for a city of this size and is invisible in the way most firms here describe themselves.

A city whose own residents habitually travel to Dublin or Cork for advice they could get at home, not because the local firms are worse but because the local firms are not the answer that came back when they asked.