🧈Investment accounts, airport growth & a butter fight

31 August 2026

Good morning. The Government has put some actual shape around its new investment accounts, while Shannon and Dublin Airport are offering two very different pictures of Irish aviation growth. There’s also a $1bn Irish butter brand facing a rather awkward pricing fight in America. Let’s get into it.

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Monday - The Weekend Round-Up…

The weekend added some fresh developments alongside a couple of quieter Irish business stories worth flagging before the week gets going.

Cubic3, the SoftBank-backed connected-car software firm, put around 70 roles at risk, with 53 of the affected jobs in Dublin, a sharp turn just three years after SoftBank's €473m stake valued the company above €900m.

The Dáil voted 104-49 on Friday to confirm the fuel-excise pause, with Sinn Féin, Labour, the Social Democrats and the Greens all opposing the government's phasing plan as insufficient.

The Kerrygold-Tirlán butter row escalated, with Tirlán's Costco private-label deal continuing to undercut Kerrygold on US shelves. Tirlán also sold around 12 million Glanbia shares for roughly €257.6m in June, underlining its financial firepower amid speculation the dispute could trigger wider co-op consolidation.

Enterprise Minister Peter Burke hinted at "significant" new multinational data-centre investment following the Large Energy User Action Plan, while defending edits made to a commissioned KPMG report on data centres' economic value.

1. Investment Accounts Meet The Budget Maths. The Government’s new Personal Investment Accounts will avoid deemed disposal (although it appears normal retail investors will not), it will include a tax-free threshold and charge a lower flat tax above it, although the actual rates wait for Budget 2027. That arrives as IFAC argues the €8.5bn Budget package understates already-committed costs. With 2026 overspending estimated around €2bn, giving savers a better deal look to prove easier than keeping the wider numbers inside the Government set itself.

2. Two Very Different Airport Stories. Shannon was Ireland’s fastest-growing major airport for a third month in July, with more than 280,000 passengers and traffic up almost 9% year-on-year. Dublin has a rather different expansion problem as Ulick McEvaddy’s DAT3 group is considering European court action after its proposed cargo hub was rejected over airport zoning. Shannon is showing what new routes can do for regional growth, while Dublin’s bigger problem remains agreeing what kind of expansion it is actually prepared to accommodate.

3. Irish-Linked Business Numbers Move Higher. Vertiv’s Irish profits more than doubled as booming data-centre demand lifted equipment sales, giving the AI infrastructure rush a fairly tangible Irish beneficiary. Elsewhere, Joe Duffy Motors chief Gavin Hydes has seen his 6.86% stake in UK dealer Vertu Motors rise to about €22.2m after the shares climbed 47% this year. Different businesses, but a decent Monday for profits and portfolio values.

4. Kerrygold Has A Butter Fight On Its Hands. Tirlán is supplying Costco with private-label Irish grass-fed butter at roughly $15 per kilo, well below Kerrygold’s roughly $21. Kerrygold passed $1bn in US sales last year, so this is more than two Irish dairy groups fighting for shelf space. Private label offers Irish producers more volume but getting too good at undercutting Kerrygold could make defending the premium Irish butter brand rather a difficult reality.

5. Builders Want More Stick For Idle Land. Glenveagh wants tougher land-hoarding penalties, potentially including an escalating Residential Zoned Land Tax, and says higher planning fees could work if they properly resource planning departments. It expects more than 40,000 homes to be completed this year. Investors are feeling relatively cheerful too after Cairn Homes led the ISEQ last week, gaining about 2.8% ahead of interim results on Wednesday. Housebuilders are effectively asking for policy that makes it more practical to build homes and also their profits.

The US has struck a 25-year agreement with Venezuela covering 65bn barrels of oil, with Washington set to control 55% of a joint venture, although the legal framework remains unpublished and analysts say any meaningful increase in global supply could take years. The US-Canada trade war is also biting harder, with Canada’s effective US tariff rate nearly doubling from 2.9% to 5.7% and around 55,000 Canadian manufacturing jobs lost over the year to January. Ottawa’s retaliation is now targeting politically sensitive US states ahead of the midterms. In Britain, Andrew Bailey says the Bank of England can still watch inflation for now, while Airbus is exploring a sale of its US space business as it focuses on building a larger European satellite group.

Tech & AI

Scale was the main issue across tech over the last seven days, from the infrastructure needed for AI to the difficulty European companies have turning good technology into world leading businesses.

AI infrastructure spending remained strong. Nvidia forecast $108bn in revenue for its current quarter, above analyst expectations, although the muted share reaction showed just how high investor expectations have become. Intel, meanwhile, plans to more than double Irish output in 2027 as demand for its Granite Rapids data-centre chips remains ahead of supply.

Consumer technology is looking for growth elsewhere. Foldables account for only around 2% to 2.5% of global smartphone sales by volume but roughly 10% by value, with Samsung pushing further into the category and Apple expected to follow. With overall smartphone shipments under pressure, manufacturers are increasingly relying on higher-priced devices to lift revenue.

The Irish picture goes beyond data centres. Twenty-two Irish tech firms made Deloitte’s latest EMEA Fast 500, with StormHarvester ranking 24th, while W4 Games raised €15.4m and partnered with Tencent to expand the Godot game engine in Asia. Kitman Labs also signed a multi-year partnership covering all 22 League of Ireland academies, while Revolut launched a dedicated AI research division to build its own foundation model with Nvidia. Together, those moves point to Irish tech companies increasingly selling proprietary platforms, software and IP rather than simply hosting multinational operations.

The bigger European issue is still scale. TechBBQ in Copenhagen was dominated by concern that Europe has strong talent but remains poor at turning companies into global champions. The estimated annual digital investment gap is €157bn to €227bn, while nearly 30% of European unicorns relocated outside the region between 2008 and 2021. That makes the proposed “EU Inc” regime, a single optional company structure across the bloc, one of the more concrete tech-policy issues Ireland can influence during its EU Presidency.

The next test is whether Europe can make scaling a company easier before another generation of its strongest firms decides the better route to growth is somewhere else.

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

A weekend Business Post extract revisited the Ray Burke payment scandal, including Jim Gogarty asking whether an £80,000 political payment would come with a receipt. The alleged answer was the immortal “Will we fuck!” Sporting politics has its own governance row, with the Business Post backing UEFA’s criminal pursuit of Gianni Infantino over his secret $4bn World Cup stake proposal.

And after Friday’s rain-soaked Electric Picnic warning, Stradbally seems to have delivered anyway despite mud galore, Irish acts everywhere, and Fontaines D.C. closing out the weekend with a Slane 2027 announcement. Really quite good for three days spent sinking into Laois.

The Read – Business Post (free account required) – From LA to Limerick: How Ireland is winning Hollywood's TV business

Los Angeles television production fell 40% year-on-year last quarter and now sits 63% below its five-year average, pushing US studios toward cheaper overseas bases. Ireland's new unscripted-TV tax credit, offering 20% relief up to €15m per production, has already helped attract more than €180m in international spend since January, with roughly €90m from American producers. Fox Entertainment alone has shot over 300 hours here, and BiggerStage is investing €10m in a Limerick hub aiming to build the sector toward "half a billion plus." It reads like Section 481's film boom repeating itself in reality TV. Link: From LA to Limerick: How Ireland is winning Hollywood's TV business

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