A smarter start to the workday... DCC’s €6.73bn takeover squeezes through, while Polymarket eyes an Irish home it currently cannot operate from.

21 September 2026

Good morning. DCC’s €6.73bn takeover has finally cleared its shareholder vote, the State’s consultancy bill has climbed to €519m and Government is starting to strip stages out of the planning process. Polymarket, meanwhile, is eyeing Ireland despite being blocked here, while a Dublin finance firm has decided Premier League footballers look quite a lot like aircraft. Let’s get into it.

Monday - The Weekend Round-Up…

The weekend was heavy on funding, markets, policy and unfinished business carrying into Monday. Wayflyer added a new $50m debt facility, Glanbia’s shares extended their fall as investors questioned how durable the protein boom will prove, and some criminal legal-aid solicitors began returning to the panel after weeks of disruption. Enterprise Minister Peter Burke is pushing for a bigger entrepreneur tax-relief cap in Budget 2027, while university heads are seeking an extra €190m a year in core funding. Elsewhere, a Dublin financial-modelling firm is in talks with Premier League clubs, while researchers demonstrated how an Anthropic security tool could be used to access an OpenAI employee account during authorised vulnerability testing.

1. DCC Finally Clears The Shareholder Hurdle. After months of takeover fights, 78% of DCC Energy shareholders backed the €6.73bn offer from Energy Capital Partners and KKR, just above the 75% threshold required. High Court sanction is still needed before completion, expected in Q1 2027. The public battle is largely over; the next question is what private-equity ownership does with a business whose management still talks openly about acquisition-led growth.

2. The State’s Consultancy Bill Hits €519m. Spending involving the leading consultancy firms rose from €193m in 2019 to €519m last year, with €2.3bn paid cumulatively since 2019. Deloitte, EY, Turner & Townsend and Accenture led the table. Albert Dolan TD and Matthew Fenlon, whose procurement work we have covered before, built the database behind the figures. Government wants to bring more expertise in-house through the NDFA, but the test is whether it can attract enough of that specialist talent from the private sector and actually turn it into lower consultancy costs.

3. Government Starts Cutting Infrastructure Red Tape. Retaining Ireland’s gas-powered emergency generators is expected to add about €830,000 to the average large energy user’s bills across 2027 and 2028, but Government is also moving to shorten infrastructure timelines elsewhere. Some 77% of the Accelerating Infrastructure Taskforce’s actions are expected to be completed by quarter-end, while new rules due by month-end would remove environmental screening for housing schemes of up to 250 units and introduce similar exclusions for some wastewater plants and overhead electricity cables. The policy direction is clear as Government aims for fewer procedural stages where it believes time is added without proportionate value.

4. Rural Ireland Draws A Fresh Business Push. SIRO says only 13% of Irish businesses use full-fibre broadband despite it being available to 86% of premises nationally, and it is now targeting companies across roughly 600 business parks. Radisson, meanwhile, sees its best Irish expansion opportunities outside Dublin, where smaller regional hotels could join its network from 2027. Both are looking beyond the capital for growth, but connectivity, construction costs and local economics still decide where expansion stacks up.

5. Polymarket Likes Ireland. Irish Regulators Are Less Convinced. The US prediction market has reportedly shortlisted Ireland while exploring a European hub, but talks are early and no location has been chosen. The complication is fairly substantial in that Polymarket is currently geoblocked here after the Gambling Regulatory Authority threatened legal action, while the Central Bank says some event contracts fall under restrictions on binary options whereas in the US, they operate in somewhat of a grey area. Ireland’s regulatory reputation may attract the company, but regulation itself could decide whether it can actually operate here.

The US and China are discussing a new notification mechanism for AI incidents that could affect national security ahead of this week’s Trump-Xi summit, while Big Tech is reportedly keeping about $300bn of AI-related debt guarantees and commitments off balance sheet as infrastructure spending accelerates. Canada is also pushing for the UK to join a closer economic alliance with Europe as Ottawa looks to diversify away from the US after its latest tariff clash. In energy, Saudi Arabia has reportedly told some European refiners they will receive no crude next month following supply disruption. Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, meanwhile, has pushed back hard against AI extinction warnings, calling 2030 “doomsday” predictions irresponsible and unsupported by science.

Tech & AI

Tech & AI is measuring itself against money and caution in equal parts, as the sector's most valuable names inch toward record-breaking public listings while the industry's own leaders question how fast that build out should go.

Anthropic's planned IPO has moved and grown. Reuters reports the company is now seeking to raise as much as $100bn at a valuation near $2 trillion, having pushed its prospectus to late September and the listing itself to around mid-October, ahead of the US midterms. Nvidia is in talks to anchor the offering with up to $10bn, deepening a relationship built on Anthropic's reliance on Nvidia chips and its existing $30bn Microsoft Azure commitment. That ambition sits alongside real caution, since Dario Amodei's essay urging AI firms to "pace the frontier" against the risk of runaway self-improvement wiped over 13% off SoftBank's shares and dragged the wider chip sector down, after Anthropic disclosed its own Claude models had been misused for cyberattacks, fraud and weapons-related work between December and August. OpenAI is pursuing its own parallel track, in talks to raise fresh capital at a $1.2 trillion valuation and deepening chip cooperation with Samsung on next generation processors. Microsoft has taken a different tack, publishing a 15,000-word "Humanist AI" manifesto explicitly rejecting the race toward all-purpose superintelligence.

Closer to home, Kildare-based consultancy OpenSky is targeting €10m revenue this year helping government, health and pharma clients extract value from AI and data investments, while Dublin-founded Fin used Dreamforce to argue every business will eventually run on a single AI agent, crediting Anthropic's own use of its tool for saving 1,700 staff hours in one month.

Watch whether Anthropic's prospectus, expected within days, confirms the Nvidia anchor stake and firms up an October listing date.

In Tuesday’s Tá, the Sector Spotlight will be Legal & Regulatory.

A Dublin aviation-finance firm has decided Premier League footballers are not all that different from aircraft. Miagen, which models debt, resale values and returns for plane lessors, is now in talks with top English clubs because players increasingly look like assets with financing, optimisation and exit values attached. Swiss sportswear brand On has also signed Kylian Mbappé away from Nike ahead of its football launch in 2027. Nike’s recent slide was already uncomfortable. Losing Mbappé makes it more like someone checking for the emergency exits.

The Read – Business Post – Lucinda Creighton: Ireland can learn lessons from the US on data centres

Creighton examines how US opinion on data centres flipped from majority support to 75 per cent opposition in a year, prompting bans in New York and a moratorium in Texas. She highlights the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act, passed 417 to three, which forces developers to cover their own power and grid costs. Her argument is that Ireland's LEAP plan for co-located energy parks offers a similar route, tying data centre growth to grid investment rather than leaving households or a binary planning debate to absorb the cost. Link: Lucinda Creighton: Ireland can learn lessons from the US on data centres

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