The institution, Canada’s Vision Capital, was mainly taking aim at the board of Ires, which it alleges has not been responsive to shareholders and should take the undervalued company off-market by selling to a private buyer.

Calling Ires Reit “a failure on all fronts”, Vision’s CEO Jeffrey Olin told the Irish Independent this week that listing in Dublin was “a nice concept but it didn’t work”.

If Olin gets his wish, the ISE will lose its last Reit and yet another name from the main market.

And he's not the only one disappointed at how things are going on the equities side of Euronext Dublin, the trading name for the ISE since it was sold in 2018.

Earlier in the spring, two of its biggest components – building materials giant CRH and Paddy Power owner Flutter – announced plans to seek listings in New York.

It is likely their shareholders will approve, and two Irish homegrown global brands will decamp with hopes of joining the S&P 500 index, taking their massive share of trading volumes with them for access to greenbacks.

They would only be joining an exodus that has been years in the making.

ISE stalwarts Grafton Group, DCC, C&C and Greencore have all surrendered their Dublin listings in recent years, despite all being Irish headquartered major corporations.

And then there are the privatisations: Green Reit, Hibernia Reit, Yew Grove Reit, Applegreen and CPL. All of them took offers from private buyers in the last five years and with them went the bulk of the big post-crisis IPO companies.

Only two companies have come the other way: UK shopping centre owner Hammerson, which sought a secondary listing in Dublin to diversify its shareholder base after Brexit, and Ryanair, which dropped its London listing for regulatory reasons.

Meanwhile, the flow of initial public offerings has been desperately disappointing. Except for Uniphar, which has had an active market presence since listing in 2019, just a few tiddlers like Corre Energy, Healthbeacon and Engage XR have come to market in recent years.

While small growing firms are the lifeblood of any exchange, the volume arriving on Euronext Dublin is too little to counterbalance the losses at the top.

Efforts to attract more IPO candidates, like Euronext’s IPO Ready programme, are valiant but almost completely unsuccessful to date.

And hopes that Dublin would become a key entry point for global capital looking to trade European shares proved perhaps a little over-excited.

To be sure, there was a post-Brexit spike in trading volumes for some big stocks like Smurfit Kappa and Ryanair, with Dublin taking the bulk of trading.

This was great news, especially for stockbrokers Davy and Goodbody who depend in part on having a vibrant equity market in their home town, but the impending losses of CRH and Flutter can’t be rationalised as anything other than a disaster in terms of prestige and earning opportunities.

Both companies are big users of the capital markets, raising billions to fund acquisitions and ambitious growth plans. But both also correctly recognise that the biggest pool of investors is also in their biggest consumer market, the USA.

But the trouble at Ires hints at something more fundamental than the decision of two global scale firms deciding that New York is their kind of town.

The company, Ireland’s largest private landlord, was supposed to be tailor-made for the Irish Stock Exchange. The fact that a ground-floor investor like Vision is calling time on the experiment with Irish real estate equities – at the height of a major housing crunch – should be a wake-up-to-reality call.

Vision didn’t pull punches, calling trading volumes “exceedingly low” and equity issuance “cumbersome, costly, time-consuming and relatively inefficient”.

If that’s the book on Euronext Dublin, it should come as no surprise that companies like Galway’s Ocean Harvest went to London’s AIM this week. Or that Cathal Friel’s Raglan Capital has a singular focus on bring its stable of life sciences company to the Nasdaq, where the hope is that they can show a little leg to the right suitor and make big-time cash.

It’s hard not to look at the dire state of the equity market and conclude that Euronext bought the Irish Stock Exchange exclusively for its world-leading and perennially successful funds and debt securities markets.

Unfortunately, those don’t serve the local capital ecosystem, which appears to be withering.