Friday

Good morning. It’s the final day of launch week, and Ireland is closing with higher rates, tighter housing supply, more energy issues and the small matter of trying to build things without wasting years to paperwork. Abroad, rockets, oil and geopolitics are doing their best to make Friday more interesting. Let’s get into it.

1. ECB Announced Rate Increase. As expected, the ECB’s first rate hike since 2023 lifted the deposit rate to 2.25%, with markets now expecting up to two more rises over the next year. A 0.25-point move adds about €37 a month to a €300,000 variable mortgage over 25 years. Higher deposit rates may help savers, but they are the consolation prize; dearer mortgages, loans and working capital are the actual bill.

2. Energy Supports Face Their Audit. ESRI analysis says lower-income households were hit hardest by energy prices, while broad Government supports delivered much more cash benefit to higher-income households. Add RTÉ’s nuclear-ban debate and the energy story has moved from bills to system design. The next subsidy round will be harder to defend unless it shows exactly who is being protected.

3. Housing Demand Meets A Smaller Pipeline. Tuath and Evara plan 355 Adamstown homes, Goodbody expects completions up 11%, and Coolock cleared 618 apartments. Useful, but not enough. Planning permissions are falling, zoning fights kept surfacing this week, surveyor shortages are coming, and first-time buyer lending is at an 18-year high. More approved buyers chasing a constrained system means the pressure now moves from saving for a home to actually finding one.

4. Systems Risk Is Getting Expensive. Irish Rail’s troubled train-management system has produced a €50m write-down and warnings over Dart+ and MetroLink, while Irish firms face rising cyber risk as AI makes fraud cheaper and more convincing. Different systems, same exposure: weak controls now damage budgets, timelines and trust. Digital upgrade plans need governance as much as software.

5. Investment Still Has To Be Earned. Analog Devices marked 50 years in Ireland after more than €5bn of investment, Applegreen’s €6m Popeyes rollout promises 450 jobs, and Aldi is celebrating Irish food producers. But Ardale chief Emma Maye, after years of planning delays on Wicklow housing, says England now looks easier. Ireland is still winning investment; making expansion harder than elsewhere is the bit to watch.

SpaceX is due to start trading today after pricing its IPO at $135 a share, raising a reported $75bn and turning Elon Musk’s rocket company into the market’s latest test of gravity, complete with a ferocious debate over its price. Oil fell as Trump claimed a US-Iran deal was close, but Tehran says no final decision has been made, so Hormuz risk is not gone, but there is hope. The World Bank cut 2026 global growth to 2.5%, Britain is still trying to soften Brexit without calling it a reversal, and bankers are eyeing a $1bn fee pool from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI listings. If the US-Iran conflict really cools, the world gets cheaper fast; if not, today’s calm is just badly priced.

Property & Energy

It was a week when the building numbers moved in the right direction and almost everything else did not.

On housing supply, Goodbody published its annual homebuilder report on Thursday, forecasting an 11% rise in completions to 40,000 units this year, with Bank of Ireland carrying a similar projection. The caveat is pointed: Goodbody chief economist Dermot O'Leary noted that the pipeline of new planning permissions is "flatlining," and that new starts have been slowed by Middle East-related cost pressures. More homes are being finished; fewer are being started. That gap will matter in 2027. Meanwhile, Daft.ie's Q1 report recorded a 4.4% quarterly rent increase, the highest in a series dating to 2002, driven in part by landlords releasing properties at reset market rates following March's rental reform.

On energy, this was an uncomfortable week for EirGrid's flagship infrastructure project. The Celtic Interconnector, the 700MW subsea cable linking Cork to Brittany, now faces a projected total cost approaching €2 billion, up from €1.62 billion, with completion pushed to late 2028. EirGrid did complete all onshore cable installation in Ireland this week, a genuine milestone, but the marine works are the critical path. The timing is poor: Electric Ireland announced an 8% residential electricity price increase from 1 July, and gas still sets the marginal price on most days, meaning the structural fix Ireland needs from continental interconnection remains two and a half years away.

The two sectors are converging through energy costs, BER ratings, and development viability. The more immediate watch is EirGrid's commercial negotiations on the interconnector overrun: the company has confirmed additional costs are subject to live discussions, and any decision to pass them through to electricity customers via network charges will require CRU approval. That process has no published timeline, but its outcome will shape the economics of building and living in Ireland for years ahead.

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

Friday – The Week in Summary…

Ireland spent this week watching ambition queue behind reality. Completions rose, but permissions fell. Investment arrived, but with caveats about expansion friction. The ECB hiked, DCC held its nerve and forced private equity to pay up. The Celtic Interconnector cost climbed while energy bills did the same. Globally, the week is closing with SpaceX set to smash IPO records as the largest in history and its xAI segment putting a public-market number on the AI infrastructure boom that Ireland is both hosting and paying for. At every turn, the price of ambition turned out to be higher than the plan. Monday will tell us whether that rule applies to the rockets too.

The World Cup has started with the first of three opening ceremonies, because one ribbon-cutting was apparently too efficient for a split-country tournament. Barcelona got fireworks as Pope Leo blessed Sagrada Familia’s new tower, with the never-ending construction finally nearing completion, while Washington prepared a UFC cage on the White House lawn for Trump’s 80th birthday. Somewhere, a county council summer festival committee is watching all this and quietly adding “light show” to the agenda.

The Read – RTÉ Brainstorm – How AI Is Creating An Industrial Revolution In Fraud And Deception

You caught the cyber-risk piece earlier, but this is the read that explains why AI has changed fraud economics, not just fraud tactics. The analysis argues AI has lowered the cost, speed and skill threshold needed to produce convincing deception, from synthetic voices and deepfakes to personalised scam messages at scale.

For Irish firms, that shifts security from an IT concern to a payments, approval of same and a  staff training problem. Anyone signing off invoices, client money or customer data should read it before the next urgent transfer request arrives. Link: How AI is creating an industrial revolution in fraud and deception.

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