Ireland Goes All-In On AI & Irish Flaunt In America

23 September 2026

Good morning. Ireland is leaning hard into AI, tokenised finance is getting real infrastructure, and Irish-US business is getting plenty of attention in New York. Further down, legal aid moves into the data, Finance & Markets gets the deeper treatment, and The Craic finds a possible new use for a field in Meath. Let’s get into it.

1. Ireland Is Going All-In On AI. Ireland now has Europe’s highest generative AI adoption rate, with Microsoft estimating 49.9% of people aged 15 to 64 used a product in Q2. That sits beside a much bigger infrastructure bet with PwC-backed modelling saying a severe global chip shortage could cut forecast Irish data-centre investment by a third. Ireland is becoming a serious AI user and host; that also makes access to chips, energy power and international capital commercially important.

2. Tokenised Finance Gets Real Infrastructure. Ireland’s €5.5tn funds industry is being pitched as the foundation for a home-grown generation of fintech and tokenisation companies, following the path from pharma FDI to Irish life-sciences startups. This comes as the ECB has launched Pontes, allowing tokenised securities to settle in central-bank money, with Deutsche Bank and Santander already onboarded. The opportunity is moving beyond crypto enthusiasm towards the plumbing of mainstream finance.

3. Irish-US Business Gets A Week In New York. Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Helen McEntee is using UN week to meet Irish companies expanding in America and US multinationals investing here, including West Cork-founded Granite Digital and ServiceNow, which employs more than 750 people in Ireland. This comes at a key time as Washington has kept open the possibility of retaliatory action against Irish airlines over Dublin Airport’s passenger cap. The transatlantic relationship remains enormously valuable, but individual business barriers are harder to ignore.

4. The Legal Aid Fight Moves To The Data. The long-running dispute over the €520 criminal legal-aid fee reached the Oireachtas Justice Committee, where the Law Society said certificates issued in August were down 86% year-on-year to 395, following July’s 93% fall. Solicitors also challenged Government claims that the courts are operating effectively, arguing some certificates are being issued by judges without a solicitor applying for them and therefore overstate actual representation. With the committee seeking an engagement with Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan and a judicial-review judgment due in October, the argument is now over what the system is actually managing to process.

5. Any Other Business: Origin, KeyWaste And The Merrion. Origin Enterprises reported €100.7m of operating profit on €2.1bn of revenue, with Living Landscapes now contributing almost 20% of group operating profit as agriculture weakened. KeyWaste more than quadrupled pre-tax profit to €7.81m after administrative expenses fell, while the Merrion Hotel lifted pre-tax profit 20% to €4.22m and increased headcount to 381. Three very different businesses, but useful evidence on where Irish corporate earnings are actually coming from.

Oil slipped below $100 a barrel after Iran said the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within seven days if US military pressure eases, giving markets another reason to price a little less supply risk. Paramount Skydance reached a settlement with 12 US states that had sued to block its $110bn Warner Bros Discovery takeover, removing a major legal obstacle. The EU and Philippines reached a “substantial” agreement on a free-trade deal covering tariffs and market access, while UK borrowing climbed to £18.3bn in August, almost a fifth higher than a year earlier. Meanwhile, SoftBank-backed SB Energy has slowed plans for a roughly $50bn IPO despite not yet having brought a data centre online, a useful reality check on just how far AI valuations have run ahead of physical delivery.

Finance & Markets

Money kept finding new shapes to move through this week, and Irish finance played host to several of them at once.

Revolut pushed its global ambitions further, picking up a banking licence in Colombia and lodging an application with Swiss regulators, while chief executive Nik Storonsky told French media he ultimately wants any listing anchored in the US for its deeper liquidity, even as the firm explores a dual New York and London listing. With 3.4 million Irish customers, Revolut's next moves matter well beyond Dublin's fintech scene.

Closer to home, First Citizen Finance, the non-bank lender built out of PTSB's old car-finance business, raised €579m through securitisation of two loan portfolios this week, following a €264m auto-loan deal and a €315m commercial property bond. Chief executive Chris Hanlon called the demand significant given the "current geopolitical climate," a reminder that Irish non-bank lenders are still finding buyers for structured debt even as global yields wobble.

The bigger structural question came from Forvis Mazars, who argued Ireland needs to move beyond administering funds and start housing the actual dealmakers behind private credit, pointing to aviation leasing as the template and flagging reform of the ICAV Act as one lever. Separately, Marsh's latest investor survey found over half of major asset owners planning to raise infrastructure allocations, while a third to 40 percent across major regions plan to trim US equity exposure.

Watch whether Revolut's Swiss licence application progresses before year end, the clearest test of its international ambitions.

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

Wednesday - By The Numbers

9%: Irish job postings on Indeed have averaged more than 9 per cent below the same period last year across the first nine months of 2026, with Dublin's postings sitting 18 per cent under their pre-pandemic baseline, the lowest of any major employment region.

14.9%: The share of Irish job postings that now mention AI, the highest proportion among European countries Indeed tracks, even as overall hiring demand cools.

34%: The year-on-year drop in Dublin planning permissions in the first quarter of 2026, even as national commencements ran nearly two and a half times higher than last year's unusually low comparable period.

41.9%: The share of Dublin planning permissions actually activated by June, according to the Dublin Housing Task Force, the clearest evidence yet of the gap between approvals and delivery on site.

7,000: Humanoid robots sold globally for industrial and professional use last year, still a fraction of the roughly 542,000 conventional industrial robots installed in 2024.

Eamon Waters, a man whose purchases have a habit of raising questions, has done it again, buying an 80-acre farm near Ratoath for €2m. Convenient timing, because student-housing developers are currently debating whether fewer bike spaces could help squeeze more bedrooms into schemes. Really. Maybe the answer is obvious: park the bikes in Eamon’s field in Meath. There should be room beside the other 521 acres he bought in 2023.

Of course, if you do eventually secure student accommodation only to discover your bike is somewhere outside Ratoath, you’ll probably need a holiday by the time you retrieve it. In that case, keep going west. More than one million passengers passed through Shannon between May and August, up 11.5% year-on-year. At this rate, the bike may get you to Shannon before Dublin there's enough student accommodation for all who require it.

The Read – Business Post (Requires Free Account) – Will the Strait of Hormuz be a 'worthless body of water' in two years?

US treasury secretary Scott Bessent claims new pipelines from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the UAE will strip the Strait of Hormuz of its strategic importance within two years. Qatar's energy minister disagrees, pointing out the pipelines only handle oil, while Qatar's liquefied natural gas, about a fifth of world supply, has no route around the strait. The piece lays out actual pipeline capacities versus pre-war volumes, showing how far reconstruction still has to go. A useful corrective to confident political claims about energy infrastructure. Link: Will the Strait of Hormuz be a 'worthless body of water' in two years?

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