According to our latest figures agriculture & fishing start-ups founded in 2007, were most likely to have survived the recession when compared to all other business sectors while start-ups in the hospitality, construction and IT sectors had the highest rates of failure.

Our data on survival rates of Irish start-ups during the recession, comes in the wake of the CSO's publication of their 'Business Demography' report which looked at the number of company start-ups since 2007. Their research also looked at how start-ups which commenced trading in 2007 had fared since that time up to end 2012. According to CSO data just under half of all start-ups half (48.8%) were still in business by end 2012.

We examined this further and found that agriculture & fishing, with a survival rate of 74.7%, over the period since 2007 was the most robust business start-up sector. This was followed by the utilities sector with a 65.7% survival rate and leasing start-ups at 64.7%.

On the other end of the scale, we found that that the weakest sectors in terms of start-up survival rates were hospitality at 37.1%, construction at 43.6% and IT at 45.7%.