But the man who has made more money in Dublin than most over the past decade, Welshman Gervais Williams, has turned that notion on its head. His top-rated investment vehicle, the Gartmore Irish Growth Fund, is packed with the minnows that others forgot.

While others obsess about AIB, CRH and Bank of Ireland, Williams and his team are out pressing the flesh with people such as Anne Heraty, whose CPL recruitment business is valued at less than 150m, or the increasingly bullish management at Datalex, a travel trade software supplier valued at just over 50m.

It is not that Williams has no interest in blue chips. It's just that he sees no reason why any one stock should account for more than 10% of the fund, whose investments on both sides of the border are now worth £127m ( 190m).

These include stakes in Iseq heavyweights such as AIB, CRH, Grafton and C&C.

But there are also some noticeable omissions, with Williams having ditched all of Gartmore's holding in Ryanair, while the fund has no positions in Kerry Group or Irish Life & Permanent.

He acknowledges that not all small caps are winners, picking out Trintech, Qualceram Shires and Iona as disappointments. But on the whole, the strategy has paid off handsomely.

Over the last decade, Gartmore's Irish fund was the second-best performer of all funds tracked by the UK Association of Investment Trust Companies. It has also beaten the overall Iseq index by a mile, growing by close to 130% over the past five years when the Iseq could not quite manage 40% growth.

As the main investors in the fund, the big London institutions have been the main beneficiaries of this growth.

The fund is available through all the Dublin stockbrokers but they prefer to keep it under the counter in case it interferes with sales of their own Irish equity funds.

Williams says there is no substitute for face time with company management in determining whether the shares are about to take off and his team gets through about 200 Irish meetings a year. "These visits form an important part of our assessment of factors such as the rigour of a company's business plan, the quality of management and the strength of companies' franchises."

The visits also help the fund managers keep tabs on events likely to move the share price, such as last year's disposal by Viridian of its Sx3 software business, a transaction that allowed the Northern Ireland electricity supplier to book a cool £100m profit.

Gartmore had been buying into Viridian since early 2004 at less than £6 a share.

Following the Sx3 disposal, it was able to take a profit at close to £8 a share. And there may be more fuel in the tank, with recent reports of corporate interest in Viridian sending the shares to over £10.

CPL is another success story. It was always well placed to benefit from the boom in the jobs market, but the recruitment firm was too small to register on most fund managers' radar screens. "It's a classic example of a smaller stock where most investors lose touch with a change in prospects, " says Williams.

Exploration stocks are often shunned by fund managers as too speculative, but Gartmore's holdings include Island Oil & Gas, the AIM-listed company that begins drilling off Kinsale in April.

The fund also invested in Dragon Oil and made a tidy profit when the state-owned Emirates National Oil Company bought a majority stake.

With its focus now on Turkmenistan, Dragon Oil has become a bit too exotic for Williams' taste.

Williams believes Ireland still offers a lot of investment upside: the population is young, labour markets are flexible, corporate taxes are low and government finances are sound.

The emerging markets of "new" Europe may offer even better investment potential, but Williams says Ireland can keep its competitive edge because of an English-speaking workforce, stable regulation and a risk-reward profile for investors that remains "stunningly attractive".