Venture capital group Ion Equity is set to follow up its first investment outside Ireland with similar ventures in the medium term.

Ion made its first investment beyond these shores last week with the purchase of a Trinity Mirror media and exhibitions business, Inside Communications.

The business will be rebranded as Ocean Media and will be registered and owned in the Republic, although it will continue to operate from the UK, where its management and operations are based.

Ion director, Ulric Kenny, says that the company currently has its eye on similar opportunities outside Ireland. "They're in the early stages of development and I would not expect any deals just yet, but we have a few under our watch at the moment," he says.

The Dublin-based group essentially operates two businesses: one is an adviser that raises cash on behalf of corporate clients, and the other is directly involved in equity investment, along with private backers and bank partners.

Ion made its first serious impact on the headlines when it bought student travel company Usit out of receivership in 2002. It was the principal shareholder in that deal.

It's been involved in a number of deals since then and was an investor in property management company Vector, which was merged with Irish Estates in a €30 million transaction in December 2004. Its most recent deal was the purchase, through its vehicle Topaz, of the Statoil network of service stations for €285 million. It added these to the Shell outlets that it bought last year.

While Ion took a substantial stake in Usit, it tends to take minority stakes in the businesses it buys. It purchases them in partnership with private investors, who have considerable financial clout of their own.

In the Statoil case, Galway property developer Gerry Barrett was an investor along with telecoms entrepreneur Denis O'Brien.

The debt was provided by Anglo Irish Bank, with which Ion acts in a number of deals. The bank "shepherds" the private investors to Ion.

Kenny says there is a big appetite among Irish investors for opportunities to invest in overseas corporate opportunities.

"Everyone is well aware that Irish money is pouring into the UK property market, but very little of that has gone into corporate investment," he says. "But there is a hunger amongst Irish investors for those opportunities."

Ion has never been directly involved in the property market, although there have been property elements to some of its purchases. Instead, it looks for established businesses that generate good cashflow.

Ocean Media is a good example of this. It's been in business for 40 years and has sales of around £26 million (€38 million) annually.

One of its main assets is its ownership of Britain's National Caravan and Boat Show, which is held in Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre (NEC) every year.

It also owns a number of trade magazines, including Inside Housing, the leading magazine in the social housing sector.

Kenny says that its management is entrepreneurial and looking for opportunities to expand the business through acquisition. So it is likely to go down this road.

Ion's chief executive, Neil O'Leary, Kenny and Joe Devine founded the company in 2000 as a technology-focused venture capital adviser. However, it has evolved a long way from that point.

As an advisor, it is still active in the technology sector, but it does not invest in these businesses. According to Kenny, it advises on one technology fund raising in the Republic every year, and does five or six outside the country. Recently it raised €100 million for a German internet advertising business, Global Media.

He agrees that there should be concern over the fact that investment is flowing out of this country into property and business opportunities, while there appears to be little of it available to support entrepreneurs at home who are presumably creating what will be the next vanguard of Irish business and economic growth.

"I think what happened is that we missed the wave in the late Nineties, we came to it a bit too late, with the result that a lot of people, particularly private investors, had very bad experiences that they don't want to repeat," he says.

"If you're a young person now and you have some money and you are entrepreneurial and want to give something a go, you're going to look around and ask yourself what have people been making money out of? There's only one answer to that."

That answer is, of course, property. However, Kenny argues that most of the opportunities to make "fast money" in the Irish market have gone and says that he would be more bearish about the market here than in many other locations. "But there are good opportunities in other countries," he says.