Monday

13 July 2026

Good morning. Kicking off week 5 of Your Morning Tá with public pay is colliding with Budget maths, Irish pension capital is being asked to look closer to home, and the retrofit economy is hiring. Abroad, the US-Iran conflict is moving through ships, strikes and oil prices, while Big Tech’s next growth phase comes with regulators attached. Let’s get into it.

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1. Public Pay Runs Into The Budget Maths. Fórsa is balloting more than 90,000 public servants on industrial action after pay talks failed to produce a new agreement. The IMF has separately warned Ireland against allowing temporary revenue strength to fund permanent spending commitments. A pay deal may be needed to protect services and retention, but every recurring increase narrows what Budget 2027 can offer elsewhere.

2. SE Systems Builds Around The Retrofit Pipeline. Cork-based sustainable-energy company SE Systems plans to create up to 150 jobs nationwide over the next two years, alongside a €3m headquarters and a target of doubling turnover to €100m by 2030. Roles will span engineering, software, project management and energy services. Ireland still relies heavily on fossil fuels, but the work required to change that dependence is becoming an employment sector of its own.

3. Delivery Platforms Face A December Deadline. New EU platform-work rules must be transposed into Irish law by 2nd of December, changing how delivery companies determine employment status and use automated systems to allocate, monitor and assess work. The directive will not automatically turn every courier into an employee, but it will require greater transparency and human oversight. Flexibility may survive, though the payroll, compliance and takeaway costs are likely to look different.

4. Pension Capital Is Being Asked To Come Home. The Irish Association of Pension Funds is calling for a dedicated fund to give pension schemes greater access to Irish infrastructure, housing and enterprise assets, arguing that the shift away from domestic investment has gone too far. Trustees will need suitable products, competitive returns, and governance strong enough to show that domestic allocation serves members rather than Government policy.

5. PTC’s Irish Profits Come With A Small Tax Bill. The Irish arm of US software company PTC reportedly recorded profits of almost €240m but paid a tax bill of €151,000. The figures require care because accounting profit, taxable profit and cash corporation tax are not interchangeable, particularly inside multinational groups. Nonetheless, the accounts offer a useful window into how large profits can still sit in Ireland without producing an equally striking direct tax payment.

Iran said it had closed the Strait of Hormuz after striking a commercial vessel travelling on what Tehran called an unauthorised route. Trump insisted the waterway remained open before the US launched further strikes on Iranian coastal and military targets. Oil jumped more than 4% as the dispute moved from words to ships and firepower. Brussels also told Meta to change allegedly addictive Instagram and Facebook features, while EU Justice Commissioner Michael McGrath prepares wider consumer-protection powers against manipulative digital design. Spain, meanwhile, pushed back against Trump’s latest trade threats.

Tech & AI

It has been a week where AI's frontier kept advancing while the legal and regulatory bills for the last decade of tech growth kept arriving. OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6, its Sol, Terra and Luna family, after a brief government-mandated delay over cyber capabilities, the same dynamic that grounded Anthropic's Mythos-tier models before access was restored. Days later Apple sued OpenAI in California, accusing it and hardware chief Tang Tan of systematically extracting Apple trade secrets to build a rival device. Apple's Cork operations, its largest base outside the US, sit well away from the courtroom, but the case underlines how personally this rivalry now runs.

Brussels moved on two fronts at once. The European Commission preliminarily found Meta's Instagram and Facebook addictive by design, in breach of the Digital Services Act, and told the company to disable autoplay and infinite scroll by default; a fine could reach roughly $12 billion. Separately, the Commission's record Digital Markets Act penalty against Google over search self-preferencing is expected before its August recess, adding to last week's €4.125 billion Android fine. Both companies run their EU operations from Dublin, so the compliance work, and any redesign, lands on Irish soil even if the fines don't.

Away from the giants, Europe's startups had their strongest funding quarter in four years, raising $24 billion, almost entirely on AI's back. The UK, Germany, France and Sweden took the lion's share; Ireland was conspicuously absent from that top table.

The pattern is a sector maturing faster than its regulation, with Dublin increasingly the address where that friction gets resolved. Watch the Google DMA decision this month, and whether Ireland's absence from Europe's funding surge becomes a talking point at Government level.

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

Monday - The Weekend Round-Up…

The weekend showed what happens when financial scale outruns the structures built to explain it. The Currency put Ireland’s system at €26.8bn in Irefs, more than €1.1tn in Section 110 assets and €268bn in aviation leasing, with transparency and oversight now the harder policy question. EasyJet supplied the live corporate example: Apollo’s £7.15-a-share proposal values the airline at about £5.7bn, above Castlelake’s earlier £6.90-a-share offer worth roughly £5.5bn. EU ownership rules, fleet financing and rival-bid deadlines still stand between a higher price and a completed takeover.

CAB returned almost €15m in seized criminal wealth to the Exchequer last year, proving some illicit money does eventually find its way back to Revenue. Norwegian Air is also paying up after a World Cup bet by wearing British Airways colours, while the Irish Times has a feature on Count Binface, the Clacton by-election challenger to Nigel Farage. Between confiscated cash, an airline dressed as its rival and Farage being challenged by a bin, Monday has opened with consequences in unusually literal form.

The Read – The Irish Times – The perils of kissing up and kicking down at work

Every office has one: the colleague who charms upward and undermines downward and somehow keeps getting promoted for it. The piece draws on workplace psychology to explain why managers reward confidence and deference while missing the damage done to junior staff, and why performance reviews rarely catch it since the people who see it have no say in promotions. Anyone managing a team, or puzzled by a colleague's rise, should read this before their next one to one. The Link: The perils of kissing up and kicking down at work

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