The route to making money in Ireland, or for that matter any country, has many origins.
The most conventional way of making money is to go through the education system from primary through secondary level and ideally through third-level colleges or universities. From this system, people will emerge armed with a degree that will allow them find a job within their chosen sector, be it engineering, law business, medicine, computing etc. They are now qualified to bring your skills to the marketplace by seeking a job working for relevant companies and organizations related to their field of expertise, although circumstances may dictate that this will not always be the case.
After that they enter the system that for most will be a life working for somebody else on salary or weekly wage.
They may work for a multi-national company, a corner shop, as a lawyer in a big practice, as an accountant, cleaner, factory worker and a thousand other possible jobs.

A small amount of the working population is self-employed. They work for themselves providing services and goods to others for reward. They could be plumbers, painters, doctors, accountants and many other trades and professions. The farming sector is generally included in this category, although in practice a lot of the bigger farms are actually businesses.

A smaller sector still are those entreprenaurs who run their own companies, employing other people selling services and goods, or perhaps in manufacturing or distributing goods. The owner or owners are directors of the company and draw salaries from it along with dividends as shareholders if it makes a profit.

It is very difficult to make money working for somebody else. You may climb the corporate ladder and eventually get a shareholding in the company and be rewarded with large bonuses and dividends, but by and large this is a route for the very few and gifted.
If you are self-employed you can earn substantial money depending on your trade or profession. Indeed, what you do may evolve into a business which becomes very valuable.
If you have a successful business, you make a lot of money from selling it or extracting dividends from it. Surplus money from a business can be re-invested to expand the business or be put into alternative investments such as property, equities, bonds or other businesses. Here lies the possibility of making large amounts of money, although not without the risk of losing it as well.
The employee on the other hand really has only got the surplus of their salary over their living expenses to invest. Most put this into pension investments or education investments for their children. Short of winning the lotto or getting an inheritance, it is very difficult for those working for salary to accumulate a substantial amount of money.