Irish investors – wary of banks and bonds and with the property boom a distant memory – are now flocking to the one thing that never fails: gold.

Thousands are buying it: gold coins, gold bullion, gold bars. Keep it at source, keep it in a safe or in a bank, but the one nugget of information quickly spreading is that gold is the latest craze in safe investments.

Such is the hype that in the last year alone, Ireland's only investment company has seen business rise by 423%. Staff numbers have more than tripled in a bid to meet demand.

"It's a broad cross-section of people investing, from mature students to the chief executives of banks," explained Mark O'Byrne of Gold & Silver Investments in Dublin, which has been scrambling to keep up with demand.

At the time of writing, gold was worth $965 (€766) an ounce, a record high in Europe. Many market analysts believe it could match the all-time high of $840 in 1980, the equivalent today of $2,400. If you believe that, it's a good time to get in.

O'Byrne, who set up the company in 2003 after noticing that all-important gap, explained: "At the time I was very worried about the property market; it was a bubble that was going to burst.

"People who had gold – it was a safe haven for them. I started to look at that and I couldn't believe there was no one in Ireland who did it and no one knew anything about it. I saw an opportunity and I set up the company."

Most people buy gold coins. Governments around the world produce their own signature coin which has a set value as legal tender but which is also traded on the value of its gold.

Banks, like Credit Suisse in Switzerland, refine bars weighing anything from the small one-ounce bar to the 400-ounce bar, more commonly seen in heist movies than in somebody's living room.

But then the advice offered by gold dealers has its own intrinsic value too; rule number one: in hard times invest about 20 to 25% of your capital in the market. Rule number two: never have the precious metal on home turf.

"You can take delivery if you want but most people do not want it in the house or in a safety deposit box. Around 20% take delivery," said O'Byrne.

"Sometimes people do it; they put it in a safe in their house but we advise them not to do that. Sometimes people buy 10 or 20 or 30 coins and throw them into the attic or under the floor boards.

"We have heard all sorts of mad places, but they do have home insurance."

Gold that is delivered generally comes in the privacy of a small FedEx box, but the more common investment comes in the form of a simple certificate stipulating the exact amount of gold you have bought.

Gold & Silver Investments has a customer base in the low thousands which has generated the sale of tens of millions of euro since the company's inception. Hundreds of those thousands have the gold in their own possession.

But of all the places you might find these bars and coins, the firm's offices are certainly not one of them – the company never deals directly in gold or cash and it is never on the premises for obvious security purposes.