🚆 Fares rise 15%, Paddy Power reviews shops & Kingspan raises €850m

04 April 2026

Good morning. Public transport is getting more expensive, Paddy Power is reviewing part of its shop network and Irish-linked building firms are putting up some big numbers. Elsewhere, oil is back near $100, while today’s Property & Energy section looks at what happens when investment keeps moving faster than infrastructure. Let’s get into it.

1. Public Transport Gets 15% Price Increase. Adult bus, rail and tram fares will rise by an average of 15% from January, with commuter groups furious that fuel excise cuts for motorists are being extended at a reported cost above €2m a day. That looks particularly awkward when August corporation tax jumped 33% year-on-year and total tax receipts reached €66.3bn. Supporting motorists outside Dublin is understandable but making Government-backed public transport materially dearer at the same time is much harder to defend.

2. Paddy Power Puts 100 Shops Under Review. Flutter is reviewing up to 100 Paddy Power shops across Ireland and the UK, potentially affecting 400 roles, as higher rents, energy costs, gambling taxes and the move online squeeze its retail estate. Staff will be offered redeployment where possible. Paddy Power still has 196 Irish shops, but another round of closures would show that even a very strong consumer brand cannot make every physical location stack up.

3. Kingspan Raises €850m As Grafton Grows At Home. Kingspan completed its debut €850m green-bond sale after attracting more than €4.6bn of investor demand, giving it fresh firepower for investment and expansion. Woodie’s and Chadwicks owner Grafton separately grew H1 revenue 6.7% and adjusted profit before tax 7.1%, with the island of Ireland among its strongest markets. Two different businesses, but both point to Irish-linked building companies entering the second half with money and demand behind them.

4. Dublin And Cork Are Forecast To Outgrow Europe On Jobs. Oxford Economics expects Dublin employment to grow 1.7% a year to 2030, more than three times the European city average and ahead of London, Madrid and Paris. Marsh, which employs more than 1,000 people here, has meanwhile opened its new Dublin headquarters as a hub for investment, retirement and innovation work. The catch here is, of course, housing with Oxford ranking Dublin in the bottom quarter of 1,000 global cities for affordability.

5. Irish Software Is Raising Money And Finding Buyers. Construction-software firm LiveCosts is being acquired by Sweden’s SmartCraft in a deal valued at up to €8.45m, after growing both customers and annual recurring revenue by 60% year-on-year. Irish-founded VizCo has separately raised €1.75m to help companies let staff use AI tools without exposing sensitive data. One exit and one early-stage raise, both built around solving fairly ordinary workplace problems rather than selling AI or software for the sake of it.

Brent crude is around $96 a barrel and up 7.6% this week as renewed US-Iran fighting keeps Middle East supply risk firmly in the price. Volkswagen has approved plans for another 50,000 job cuts as Europe’s largest carmaker pushes deeper into restructuring. Nvidia is buying AI platform Hugging Face for $13bn, another enormous bet on owning more of the infrastructure around artificial intelligence. The Dutch central bank has moved 78 tonnes of gold from New York to London, citing crisis preparedness amid geopolitical unrest. Also, Revolut has received conditional US approval from the OCC, but still needs the FDIC, Federal Reserve and final OCC sign-off before it can launch as a bank there.

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 turning forecasts into decisions. Manufacturing strengthened, but PayPal put 164 roles under consultation and public-sector unions secured overwhelming mandates for industrial action. Cairn launched a €50m buyback, Expedia completed its CarTrawler acquisition and KeolisAmey took over the Luas. Ryanair then cut its passenger target as fuel costs bit, while services activity grew without employment following it. Today added another round of consequences following the announcement of public-transport fares increasing 15%, Paddy Power is reviewing up to 100 shops, Kingspan raised €850m and Grafton reported stronger Irish trading. Plenty moved this week, but much of it involved companies adjusting rather than expanding.

Serie A has Carlyle, Bain, Oaktree and Nextalia lining up to bid for a minority stake in the company that would hold its international media, betting and sponsorship rights. It appears the Americans really got the soccer bug over the summer. Europe’s new Entry-Exit System is going smoothly... missed connections doubled over the summer, with some airlines reporting a sixfold increase as passengers queued for photos and fingerprints. All of that makes tomorrow’s main event refreshingly uncomplicated. Katie Taylor fights Flora Pili at Croke Park in what is set to be her final fight, with Lidl even renaming her home store in Bray for the occasion: The Katie Taylor Lidl Store—well earned money in the marketing team coming up with that. Good luck, Katie!

The Read – Business Post (requires free account) – What's stopping the government from making the most of its wind energy?

On theme with today’s Sector Spotlight, Wind Energy Ireland chief executive Noel Cunniffe argues Ireland's real constraint is not ambition or investment but state capacity, since 15 per cent of possible wind output and 13 per cent of solar output was lost this year because the grid could not absorb it. He proposes a €25m recruitment fund to tackle a specialist shortage across planning, regulation and offshore development, noting 48 wind projects await An Coimisiún Pleanála decisions. It reframes energy security as a staffing and planning problem rather than a generation one, ahead of Budget 2027. The link: What's stopping the government from making the most of its wind energy?

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