🏗️ Glenveagh answers Cairn, ICG sale gets approved, and inflation hits 3.7%

11 September 2026

Good morning. Shareholders have made their calls on ICG and Michael O’Leary, inflation is back at 3.7%, and Glenveagh is answering Cairn with bigger delivery targets and a €100m buyback. Add another ECB hike, fresh Irish deals and a housing market still attracting capital despite the strain, and Friday has plenty interesting to get through. Let’s get into it.

1. Shareholders Make Two Big Calls. Irish Continental Group’s €1.2bn management buyout has cleared its shareholder vote. We said we'd wait to provide more on it until there was an answer and here it is, with 79.2% of eligible votes backing Eamonn Rothwell’s €8-a-share offer. The deal still requires High Court sanction. Ryanair shareholders also approved Michael O’Leary’s new remuneration policy, but only 60.7% voted in favour. Both got over the line, but the level of opposition shows investors were far from unanimous on either the price of taking ICG private or the price of keeping O’Leary incentivised, even though he claimed to be unbothered either way.

2. Inflation Makes The Budget Maths Harder. Irish inflation reached 3.7% in August, with energy and transport among the main pressures. Simon Harris wants to raise the point at which workers begin paying 40% income tax, currently €44,000 for a single person. A €2,000 increase would save an eligible worker about €400 a year, but each €1,000 added to the band costs the Exchequer roughly €230m. Harris is also examining a cut to the 33% capital gains tax rate. More relief is possible, but the tax package only stretches so far.

3. Glenveagh Raises The Housing Stakes. Cairn stole the show last week; now Glenveagh is having its say. It has raised full-year delivery guidance above 2,900 homes, lifted its order book 29% to €1.8bn and doubled its buyback to €100m. Investors like what they are seeing. Glenveagh shares are up 27% this year and Cairn almost 40%, helping prompt several private builders to explore IPOs valued between €450m and €1.2bn. Whether Ireland has room for another listed housebuilder is now a live question.

4. Irish Companies Find Bigger Owners. Salesforce has completed its $3.6bn acquisition of Irish-founded Fin, formerly Intercom, while pharmacy group Navi has agreed to sell a majority stake to French healthcare group Hygie31 for an undisclosed sum. Navi’s earlier proposed sale to Uniphar was blocked by the CCPC four years ago. These are different stages and different sectors, but the commercial logic is similar in that Irish-founded businesses are being plugged into larger international platforms with deeper distribution, capital and customer reach.

5. Any Other Business: MetroLink, Vaultree And Flahavan’s. Jacobs and AECOM have won a €550m programme-delivery role for MetroLink, putting them in charge of major oversight and coordination rather than the railway’s full construction contract. Cybersecurity company Vaultree has added €8.1m to its Series A, taking total financing above €20m, while Flahavan’s is investing €1.8m in Waterford to add 6,800 tonnes of organic-oat storage. Two  Irish businesses putting fresh money or capability into something tangible, and another a JV of two of the world’s biggest engineering firms coming in to put order on what is surely Ireland’s most infamous project. 

The ECB raised its deposit rate to 2.5% and lifted its inflation forecasts, with Christine Lagarde calling the move a “no brainer” as energy costs keep pressure on prices. Volkswagen has earmarked about €16bn for restructuring, including plant closures and the cost of cutting up to 60,000 jobs worldwide. AI demand is pulling the other way as TSMC’s August revenue jumped 53%, while Chinese chipmakers are raising accelerator prices as high-bandwidth memory shortages push up costs. Anthropic has now given EU cybersecurity agency ENISA access to its Mythos 5 model for testing. Saudi oil production, meanwhile, fell 23% in August as Houthi disruption squeezed exports. For Ireland, that mix lands through dearer mortgages and business borrowing, electricity costs still tied to expensive gas, and higher input prices for firms buying into the AI hardware boom.

Property & Energy

Property this week feels like ambition outrunning delivery, with big Dublin projects advancing on paper while the numbers on actual housebuilding point the other way.

The Irish Rugby Football Union has gone to market for a development partner to build a 257-room hotel and 77 apartments beside the Aviva Stadium, a €150 million scheme called Lansdowne Quarter that CBRE is marketing on a long-term ground lease, with the IRFU keeping the freehold and the lease income funding the game. It is a striking bet on Ballsbridge's pulling power, but no partner is chosen and no planning permission is in place yet.

Set against that, AIB's construction PMI showed housing activity contracting again in August, dropping to 46.9 even as commercial building held up, a reminder that headline-grabbing schemes do not always translate into completed homes.

The Land Development Agency has meanwhile struck a deal with Joe O'Reilly's Castlethorn to buy 562 homes in a Parkgate Street scheme beside Heuston Station, due for completion in 2029 and including what will become Ireland's tallest building at 30 storeys.

On energy, the Ireland Electrified alliance, including ESB and Energia, is pressing the Government to shift network costs onto general taxation and cut VAT on electricity ahead of the budget, arguing high per-unit charges are discouraging households from switching to heat pumps and EVs. None of that is agreed policy yet.

Separately, Housing Minister James Browne has compared open bidding wars to gambling, telling the Business Post he is examining a closed-bid system and may rebalance the process toward buyers within months.

Watch whether Browne's department produces a concrete bidding-reform proposal before the budget, since so far it remains at the discussion stage.

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

Friday – The Week in Summary…

Ireland spent the week putting numbers on where business is actually heading. DECI, Amazon and First Derivative added jobs and investment; Uniphar, Glenveagh and Grafton showed growth in very different corners of the economy; ZeroRisk, Vaultree and other Irish firms raised fresh capital; and Fin, Navi, Waterland, ICG and PTSB all advanced through ownership or deal processes. Against that, energy bills rose, the ECB hiked again and inflation reached 3.7%. By today, even Cairn and Glenveagh’s share-price strength was prompting talk of another listed housebuilder. It's been a week of companies expanding, changing hands... and being repriced, while the cost base underneath them kept shifting too.

Michael O’Leary got his big pay deal approved and still found enough time to celebrate by doing his favourite thing: talking to the media. A few unsavoury things were said, but his main advice was that Donald Trump deserves a “warm welcome” when he arrives in Ireland this weekend. Penneys, meanwhile, is finally embracing home delivery, provided your home is in Britain - unlikely if you're reading this. Meanwhile, Netflix is lifting its standard Irish subscription to €18.99 a month, up 172% since it launched here in 2012. At that price, staying home and finding something to watch on Netflix is becoming a financial commitment in itself.

The Read – The Journal – Primark to offer online home deliveries, but only in Britain

Primark is launching home delivery for the first time, backed by a newly acquired Sheffield warehouse, but a company spokesperson confirmed the move does not apply to Ireland, where even click and collect remains unavailable nine years after Penneys' website first launched. The shift comes as parent Associated British Foods reported Primark like-for-like sales down around 3 per cent for the quarter and roughly 2.6 per cent over the past year, driven by weakness in continental Europe, sending AB Foods shares down more than 10 per cent. The retailer is still separating Primark from its food business ahead of a standalone FTSE 100 listing due by the end of 2027. It is a useful read on how a famously analogue Irish-rooted brand is modernising everywhere except home. Link: Primark to offer online home deliveries, but only in Britain

Share Your Morning Tá with someone who'd find it useful…

See you on Monday. ☘️ Your Morning Tá – Ireland's daily brief for professionals.