The company pool in Dublin seems large enough to me (relative to the size of the city) when you count the handful of large companies and the many small companies. The pool of (good) candidates is tiny though - I've spoken to a lot of companies at events like PyCon Ireland and the IrishDev conferences a few years back and just word of mouth through less formal events and everyone is looking for employees! Google, Facebook, Amazon, Demonware - they are all hiring and (from talking to people working at them) are having a hard time finding enough people. Then there are lots of small companies that are finding it even harder still to hire (and they can't offer all the perks your Googles and Facebooks can...) - my former employer called me a few times to see would I come back; I get emails and linkedin messages asking if I'm available for work all the time; I get friends sending me messages to see am I available for XYZ.. everyone is having a hard time filling positions. I also don't know if companies just aren't offering enough money, but I get the impression that there just aren't enough good candidates out there.

So, from that, I would say that a startup in Dublin[1] is not a good idea from an availability of talent perspective - there may be talent there, but they're all happily employed.

[1] outside of Dublin, the availability of candidates seems to generally be worse still, though some towns that have schools/ITs/unis but lack of companies (eg Carlow) may have some people who would rather not move to Dublin

"The company pool in Dublin seems large enough ... relative to the size of the city" might be true but the city ranks 34th in Europe by population, its just my opinion from my observations but I have been underwhelmed on the opportunities available for IT in Dublin on 2010-2011 when I was looking actively.

Not saying that you did anything wrong - I obviously don't know your specific situation - but my experience has been the opposite (2008-present). The key is definitely networking. Through Python Ireland alone, I have got more job offers and requests for interviews than I know that to do with. Both last year and the year before I spoke to a lot of company reps and employees at Pycon Ireland and the general consensus was that its hard to find good candidates and that companies, large and small alike, are having difficulties filling their open positions due to lack of people. I personally get messages asking if I'm available from work every other week (and I'm not including recruitment agencies/shotgun HR emails in that).

I've wondered how difficult the hiring needs to be before companies will consider hiring good engineers to work remotely. So much of the dev work I've done over the years could have been coordinated/overseen from the other side of the world via email/chat/Skype just as well as it was through the (many) useless meetings we had in person.

Some people I know are already working remotely (myself included, though I do contract work, rather than full time employment) - they seem to start working on site and slowly transition to remote. One guy I know is working for a startup in Dublin but recently moved to Berlin and he is working remotely from there.

It still seems rare though and I too wonder how difficult it needs to become before this becomes more accepted.

Recruitment methods are the key to attracting good talent. My experience is that building a quality network and engaging in the local developer community is by far a more productive way to recruit than by using an agency or more traditional means.

At the same time, I think more companies also need to embrace remote workers. A lot of the best tech startups that I'm familiar with, both in Ireland and abroad, have a healthy mix of local and remote talent.