Monday

Good morning, and welcome to the first official Your Morning Tá. After weeks of testing and learning that launching a newsletter is mostly a formatting fight in disguise, we are live. The aim is simple: sharp Irish business news, useful global context and a little personality before the inbox gets too busy. Thanks for being here at the start. Let’s get into it.

1. Consumer Spending Softened In May. Bank of Ireland says consumer spending eased in May, even though some retail categories are still holding up. Irish produce is also winning loyalty with 55% of shoppers saying they buy local to support farmers and producers. This shows that consumers have not vanished, they are simply choosing harder. Pricing power now belongs to brands that can prove value, origin or both.

2. ECB Rate Cuts Appear To Be Over. Eurozone inflation has revived talk of ECB rate rises, just as weak Irish GDP figures helped drag the bloc into reverse. Ireland’s multinational-heavy numbers can make the economy look worse than it feels, but the rates signal matters more. Borrowing, pay and investment plans need testing against dearer money again, not last year’s relief story.

3. Dublin Airport Cap Is Dominating Infrastructure. Dublin Airport’s passenger cap could be removed within weeks, easing a constraint airlines and tourism groups say is choking growth. Housing shows the slower version of the same capacity problem: Ballymore has approval for 159 homes in at Bray’s old golf club, while the Central Bank’s Sandyford site may not become housing for a decade. Ireland’s bottleneck is not ambition; it’s delivery.

4. AI Investment Is Outrunning Skills. An EY survey says 82% of respondents are investing in AI, nearly double last year’s 44%, but skills shortages are now the biggest obstacle. Amazon Leo, its Starlink rival, is ramping Irish operations. The opportunity is real, but ironically, the constraint is human. Training budgets will matter more than subscriptions by end.

5. Tickets.ie Collapse Exposes Trust Risk. Tickets.ie has ceased trading after 22 years, leaving festivals in Leitrim and Donegal claiming they are owed more than €400,000. BP continues management of its fallout with former CEO Albert Manifold, while Diageo is reportedly planning a major operational overhaul under Dave Lewis. Three very different stories sharing one pressure point. When money, leadership, or operations changes course, confidence becomes the first asset under review.

Oil prices rose again as the now 100-day US-Iran conflict kept eyes on the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow route for roughly a fifth of global oil and gas flows. Trump said Iranian assets would stay frozen until a deal is done This left markets short on diplomatic comfort considering the lack of any sort of progress on the deal front. In Europe, renewed ECB rate-hike speculation followed stronger inflation signals, putting personal and business borrowing costs back on watch. IAG also warned pricier jet fuel is likely to show up in fares. The UK, meanwhile, may buy AI chips to stop domestic firms moving stateside. The global mood is not panic, just everything costing a little more to endure.

Tech & AI

No single company defined the week, but Anthropic came close.

Anthropic dominated the global conversation on two fronts. On 1^st of June, the Claude maker filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC, setting up a potential trillion-dollar IPO in a race with OpenAI to test public market appetite for AI at scale. Days later, the company called on major labs to consider a coordinated development pause, warning that AI capability is doubling roughly every four months and approaching “recursive self-improvement” (in human terms: the point at which systems advance without human intervention). The contrast between seeking public capital while warning of existential risk says a lot about the uncertain nature of this sector. SpaceX's IPO filing also disclosed a $920m per month compute deal with Google and a separate $1.25bn arrangement with Anthropic, really underlining how capital-intensive the infrastructure layer supporting these models has become.

More locally, the European Commission published its Technological Sovereignty Package on the 3^rd of June, proposing the Cloud and AI Development Act and Chips Act 2.0. Cloud providers failing new EU sovereignty criteria face exclusion from public contracts. Ireland, as European home to AWS, Google, and Microsoft, will carry more compliance exposure from this than most member states.

Dublin had a strong week on funding. Fonoa (the Dublin-based tax-tech company) closed a $110m funding round and acquired PwC's Indirect Tax Edge platform, combining fresh capital with an established enterprise client base to build what it calls a “full-lifecycle AI tax operating system”. Irish co-founded legal AI firm Wordsmith raised $70m and confirmed plans for expansion in Ireland this year to better serve local clients.

Irish companies are no longer simply raising rounds and waiting; Fonoa and Wordsmith are acquiring assets, choosing locations, and building toward scale. The Cloud and AI Development Act's progress through EU legislative process, expected to enter formal negotiation in the second half of 2026, will be the most consequential external variable for Ireland's tech sector over the months ahead.

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

Monday - The Weekend Round-Up…

Friday closed nervously, with markets in the red after stronger US jobs data made investors doubt how quickly rate cuts are coming. In Ireland, Kennedy Wilson and Dutch pension investor APG launched a €2bn Irish residential platform covering 3,400 rental homes, showing big capital wants in on housing demand here. GoSales Solutions is adding 100 roles across sales, driving and operations. Revenue is also looking harder at employee share schemes, as stock options and RSUs become mainstream pay tools rather than niche start-up perks. Monday’s read: money is still moving, but scrutiny is travelling with it.

Katie Taylor is finally getting to fight in Croke Park. The long-promised homecoming to close a career built on medals, belts, Madison Square Garden nights, and years of everyone asking when and whether this fight would happen. Muhammad Ali was the last boxer to win in Croke Park, back in 1972, which gives the whole thing proper sporting ghosts. This time, though, history comes with a Lidl app pre-sale. The Greatest walked so Lidl customers could get ahead in the queue.

The Read – RTÉ Primetime – "Russia's refinery? Why Europe's focus has turned to Aughinish"

Three months of headlines distilled into one clear account of how a Russian-owned plant in Limerick has stayed outside EU sanctions despite evidence linking its exports to weapons used in Ukraine. Primetime traces Aughinish Alumina's ownership through Rusal back to Oleg Deripaska, examines the Irish Government's lobbying position in Brussels, and explains why the Commission declined to act this week. The plant supplies 37% of the EU's smelter-grade alumina, which is the number that keeps overriding everything else.

Essential context for anyone in trade, energy or regulatory compliance. The Link: Russia's refinery? Why Europe's focus has turned to Aughinish

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