📰A stacked news morning

16 September 2026

Good morning. Today we have the numbers behind the housing slowdown, MetroLink’s latest price tag, billions going into electricity infrastructure, fresh pressure on Budget 2027 and companies making very different calls on jobs and capital. Then there’s a Fed decision, five numbers worth remembering, the Ploughing, Vancouver and Ivan Yates. It’s a packed one. Let’s get into it.

1. Housing Now Takes Four Years To Deliver, And Metro Link Gets Priced. The Central Bank says the average home completed this year took four years from planning application to completion, twice as long as a decade ago, and it has cut its completion forecasts through 2028. MetroLink is moving the other way as Cabinet is expected to approve the next project gate today, opening the path to tendering, with the current cost range at €14.5bn to €17.5bn.

2. Ireland’s Infrastructure Pipeline Is Pulling In More Money And People. ESB invested €1.5bn in capital projects in the first half, with more than €900m tied to critical electricity infrastructure, as it begins working through the €18.9bn network investment programme approved for the coming years. AtkinsRéalis, meanwhile, has opened its refurbished Irish headquarters in Swords, supporting more than 300 staff there. Its Irish workforce has already grown beyond 750, and the engineering group is targeting about 1,000 people by 2030 as it works across projects including DART+, MetroLink, EirGrid and Uisce Éireann.

3. Budget Relief Nits Another Spending Warning. Jack Chambers says rising energy costs, particularly home-heating oil, are getting specific Budget attention. The Central Bank says broad cost-of-living supports are increasingly hard to justify, while IFAC expects this year’s spending to overshoot by more than €2bn now. Government still has room to target help, but adding another wide support package now comes with an inflation and spending-control problem.

4. Big Irish Business Decisions Are Moving Capital Around. Glenveagh’s largest shareholder Teleios has sold another 20.6m shares, while Echelon has created a new non-voting “G hurdle” share class and issued 64,504 shares to a trustee for a nominal €645. It's a type of structure that can allow participation in future upside without handing over voting control, and Echelon has separately confirmed it is seeking new financing. Brown Thomas is making a different kind of ownership decision, pushing back on Dublin City Council plans that could encourage upper floors on Grafton Street towards residential use because the retailer says that space remains important for storage and other operations.

5. Two Very Different Job Announcements. Around two dozen staff in TikTok’s Irish e-commerce team face redundancy. It comes after a much larger restructuring announced earlier this year put 667 Dublin roles at risk, alongside plans for 321 new positions. TikTok has now told staff Ireland is its smallest European TikTok Shop market by gross market value and is not expected to see significant expansion. BWG Foods is moving in the opposite direction, opening four food-service locations and creating more than 100 jobs across a new Citywest food hall and three O’Brien’s Café and Bagel Factory sites.

Europe’s push to favour goods “made in Europe” is becoming a bigger trade issue, with the UK, Japan and Turkey seeking protections for their carmakers and British businesses warning that exclusion from EU procurement rules could also raise costs for Irish supply chains. Bond markets remain unsettled too, with US Treasury yields around their highest since 2007 ahead of today’s Federal Reserve decision. In Britain, payrolls fell by 26,000 in August and vacancies dropped to a five-year low, adding to signs of a softer jobs market. Meanwhile, Europe’s struggle to secure critical minerals continues as Greek metals group Metlen says planned European gallium production could instead be sold to the US or Japan if buyers here refuse to pay higher prices.

Finance & Markets

Irish borrowing costs have gone from a market talking point to a budgetary one, and this week the numbers made that shift hard to ignore.

The yield on Ireland's 10-year bonds touched 3.68pc on Tuesday, the highest since late 2013, when the State was coming out of its bailout programme. German Bunds reached 3.57pc, and Irish yields now track them more closely than at any point in two decades. Money markets are pricing four further quarter-point ECB increases over the next twelve months, well ahead of the one or two most economists expect. The NTMA has raised €10.9bn of a €10bn to €14bn full-year target and has warned its annual interest bill could double to roughly €6bn by the early 2030s as borrowings climb towards €250bn.

Most of the pressure is arriving from abroad. The US 10-year moved above 5pc on Tuesday, its highest since July 2007, as a global bond selloff intensified on surging energy prices, inflation risk and fiscal concerns, with the 30-year above 5.3pc and headline inflation stuck at 3.4pc. More than 90pc of futures pricing points to a quarter-point hike today. Jay Woods of Freedom Capital Markets argued a hike is the cleaner call and may even lift equities, while holding would revive the sense that the Fed is behind the curve.

Domestic desks are back among the top ten Irish bookrunners for the first time since 2021, AIB second on 11.5pc share, even as Cantor exits primary dealing and closes its five-person bond desk. Revolut puts €150.6m of Irish cash sitting idle, while SYS Financial's Tony Delaney expects only 2pc to 3pc of the €170bn on deposit to reach the new Savings and Investment Accounts in year one.

Watch today's Federal Reserve decision and the accompanying projections for how far this repricing still has to run.

In Thursday’s Tá, the Sector Spotlight will be Health & Pharma.

Wednesday - By The Numbers

4 years: That’s how long the average home completed in Ireland this year took to get from planning application to finished house. A decade ago, it took two.

€17.5bn: The top end of MetroLink’s latest estimated cost, as the project finally moves towards the stage where companies can bid to build and operate it.

€2bn+: The amount IFAC expects Government spending to overshoot by this year, just as ministers are deciding how much more short-term support to put into Budget 2027.

19.9% versus €50bn: Ireland’s household savings rate for 2025 is the highest in the euro area. At the same time, Irish consumers made 1.2bn card payments worth almost €50bn in the first half of this year. We are apparently very good at both putting money away and tapping the card.

667: The number of TikTok jobs already put at risk in Dublin earlier this year. Now another two dozen e-commerce roles are facing redundancy, while BWG is announcing more than 100 new jobs.

Around 250,000 people are expected through the gates at the Ploughing this week. If that sounds a little crowded, Air Canada is starting Dublin-Vancouver more than a month earlier next year, handily in time for the tail end of ski season. Meanwhile, Ivan Yates has resurfaced in the business pages through Ingram’s Water Rock housing development. After getting kicked from Matt Cooper’s Path to Power podcast and other media ventures over undisclosed election coaching, bricks and mortar looks to be the quieter route back into print.

The Read – RTÉ – Drivers underestimate the cost of running a car, says ESRI

Irish motorists estimate the annual cost of running a car at about €2,000, but ESRI research puts the median closer to €3,000. Fuel is only part of the bill, with insurance, tax, maintenance, tolls and parking accounting for much of the gap. The comparison by fuel type is especially useful: annual running costs were estimated at roughly €1,560 for an electric vehicle, €2,715 for petrol and €3,546 for diesel. A useful piece for anyone wondering why they've no money at the end of the month. Link: Drivers underestimate the cost of running a car, says ESRI

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