We prove that the pseudovarieties of all finite semigroups, and of all aperiodic finii e semigroups are irreducible for join, for semidirect product and for Mal’cev product. In particular, these pseudovarieties do not admit maximal proper subpseudovarieties. More generally, analogous results are proved for the pseudovariety of all finite semigroups all of whose subgroups are in a fixed pseudovariety of groups H, provided th.it H is closed under semidirect product.