🏕️ A slightly lighter Friday read with business, Electric Picnic & billionaires antics

28 August 2026

Good morning. ICG is buying itself more time, Government has been handed a fairly substantial business-cost to-do list, and Intel is preparing to put a lot more through Leixlip. There’s also movement in housing finance and some very familiar Irish food brands changing hands. After that, things get a little lighter with Electric Picnic, billionaire castle buyers and football clubs as trophy assets. Let’s get into it.

1. ICG Tries To Buy More Time. Irish Continental Group is seeking to adjourn today’s vote on Eamonn Rothwell’s €1.2bn management buyout until 10 September after confirming the scheme would fail if put to shareholders now. Existing proxies will remain valid, and the company says no competing offer is being discussed. Following weeks of investor opposition, the takeover is now at a stage where it's needing extra time just to stay alive and similarly, reporting on it is trite, so this is the end of it here until there's a final result.

2. Government Gets A 63-Point Business Cost List. The Cost of Business Advisory Forum has handed Government 63 recommendations, with energy identified as the biggest cost pressure and proposals covering the CRU, business banking, switching and even a possible State-backed SME bank. That comes in a week where commercial construction costs rose 4% annually and wholesale electricity prices were 56% higher in July. The complaints are familiar and the proposed fixes are becoming much more specific.

3. Valeo Ireland Agrees Sale To Lombard-Led Group. Valeo Foods has agreed to sell its Irish business, including Jacob’s, Odlums, Batchelors, Chef and Kelkin, to a consortium led by former Valeo Ireland boss Hilliard Lombard. The operation employs more than 500 people and its historic Irish brands generate about €340m in annual sales. Valeo’s wider owner Bain is highly leveraged, so the proceeds are expected to help reduce group debt rather than fund another expansion.

4. Intel Is Preparing To Double Irish Output. Intel plans to more than double production from Ireland in 2027 as it equips existing capacity at Leixlip under its €5bn expansion programme. The site will play a bigger role producing server chips including Granite Rapids as the company rebuilds manufacturing capacity globally. Ireland gets plenty of investment announcements but putting substantially more product through an existing Irish plant is a far more useful measure of whether that investment is going to provide wider return.

5. Housing Money Is Moving At Both Ends. Mortgage approvals hit their highest monthly level since records began in 2011, with 6,253 approvals worth more than €2bn in July and first-time buyers accounting for 3,575. At the other end, AIB and Bank of Ireland are putting €70m into Avenue’s homebuilding fund, taking commitments above €220m. Buyer demand and development capital are both strengthening; turning that into actual homes remains the harder part.

Stripe and Advent have reportedly abandoned their pursuit of PayPal after a $60.50-a-share proposal valuing it above $53bn failed to win over the board. That comes just after Stripe bought startup legal-service platform Clerky, the latest in a recent acquisition run that has also included OpenRouter, Bridge, Privy and Metronome. Nvidia shares jumped after its latest forecast suggested the AI infrastructure spending boom still has plenty of life left. Global shipping is getting less comfortable, with a record 4.3m container units now waiting outside ports, although congestion remains below its Covid peak as a share of the fleet. Norway and Switzerland are meanwhile warning that growing EU protectionism risks shutting close partners out of the single market.

Property & Energy

Property and energy this week feel like money is still arriving even though delivery keeps snagging behind it.

Take energy infrastructure. Freedom of Information documents show EirGrid actually knew for six months before it told energy minister Darragh O'Brien about cable damage on the Celtic Interconnector, the 700-megawatt power link to France being built with French counterpart RTE, and now the completion date has slipped to April 2028 while Irish costs have climbed by up to €203m, pushing a project that was originally costed at €1.6bn past €2bn. It shows how flagship infrastructure can outrun not only its budget but also its own reporting lines.

Dublin's hotel market tells a more upbeat version of the same story, since capital is clearly still moving even where planning isn't straightforward. The Conrad is heading to market seeking around €130m through Archer Capital, the Zetland-owned Morrison is expected to fetch above €90m, and yet a much smaller 78-bed Baggot Street scheme has already been appealed to An Coimisiún Pleanála by a local resident, with a decision not due until 21 December.

Office and land markets are moving in a similar direction. Iput has agreed more than 22,000 sq ft of renewals and new lettings at Two Riverside, including a five-year extension from Interpath, while Knight Frank's figures show €389m of development-land deals changing hands in H1, up 37 per cent, although residential land made up only 43 per cent of that once Dublin City Council's Camden Yard purchase and Live Nation's Merchants Yard arena site pulled activity towards commercial sites instead.

On top of that, housing pressure keeps surfacing in unexpected places, with a Dublin 9 SuperValu now applying to build staff accommodation on site because the housing crisis is making recruitment so difficult.

Worth watching is whether An Coimisiún Pleanála upholds that Baggot Street hotel permission before its December deadline.

In Monday’s Tá, the Sector Spotlight will be Tech & AI.

Friday – The Week in Summary…

Ireland spent the week proving there is still plenty of money willing to back it. Exponent invested in KTL, AIB explored transferring risk on €2.5bn of project-finance loans, banks put another €70m behind homebuilding and Intel now plans to more than double Irish output next year. Government is meanwhile trying to pull more household savings into investment and grow financial-services employment to 70,000.

The more difficult side to that is what all that capital is running into. IFAC warned on Budget spending, construction costs continued rising, energy got more expensive. and now a 63-point list of business-cost fixes. Investment appetite clearly isn't the issue but ensuring Ireland can keeping taking the investment and is worth that investment is increasingly the important job.

Electric Picnic is back with 80,000 people, 800 performers and an estimated €25m-€30m staging bill, with some already pitching tents in the rain and muck. At the other end of Irish country-estate living, billionaires are increasingly buying the whole thing rather than a pitch in the garden. Zuckerberg recently bought the 440-acre Strancally Castle and James Dyson recently buying a neighbouring estate. A want for privacy, land and move-in-ready homes is driving demand for €5m-€30m estates, you know yourself. If your weekend in a field loses its charm, Ireland now has 27,891 taxi drivers to help you escape. Best of luck to everyone heading there, and perhaps somewhere between the mud and 800 performers, one of Business Post’s next Connected 100 ideas gets started.

The Reads – Business Post & RTÉ – Billionaires, castles and football clubs

Two pieces on what the ultra-wealthy buy once ordinary assets get a bit boring. The Business Post looks at growing demand for €5m-€30m Irish estates, where privacy, land and scarcity are the attraction. RTÉ takes the same idea into football, where Bezos and other billionaires are buying into clubs with enormous audiences and unusually loyal customers. The difference is that a castle rarely boos you from the stands but, as the Irish Times reported earlier this week, long-term Liverpool fans are questioning their support following Bezos's buy-in. Together, they are a good look at trophy assets, status and what happens when investment becomes partly emotional. Links:

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