07 August 2026
Good morning. It’s a very busy Friday for Irish business: semiconductor investment, rising tax receipts, strong corporate earnings, a €110m education deal and a fresh look at the financial health of Ireland’s semi-States. Abroad, EasyJet has found its buyer and billions more are moving around the AI boom. We’ve also got an extended Worth Your Time on how Ireland tracks, or struggles to track, more than €100bn of public spending. Let’s get into it.
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The Top 5
1. Ireland Wants More Of The AI Supply Chain. Tyndall is expanding Ireland’s semiconductor base through more than €100m of State-backed investment, alongside a strategy to grow its workforce above 750 by 2030. Separate digital-skills and CeADAR initiatives are targeting the people needed to actually use AI. Ireland has spent years attracting the technology giants and now the next push is building more of the chips, research, and skills sitting underneath them and to push it on.
2. Income Tax Keeps Rising, Even As Unemployment Edges Up. Income-tax receipts reached €3.3bn in July, up 12.7% year-on-year, despite unemployment increasing from 5% to 5.1%. Stronger earnings and tax bands not being fully indexed are likely helping receipts rise even with higher employment. Corporation tax also increased €1.3bn on the back of the higher rate commencing for the biggest multinationals. IFAC’s warning is the counterweight with warnings that spending is rising quickly enough that even very strong revenues are not removing the Budget pressure.
3. Ireland’s Semi-States Get A Financial Health Check. The Business Post outlines An Post delivered another €1bn-plus revenue year, DAA made €230m after tax and ESB earned €636m, but the numbers become less comfortable elsewhere. CIE generated more than €2bn of revenue but just €41m of EBITDA, while EirGrid faces an almost €19bn grid programme. Several State companies have the balance sheets but turning them into reliable infrastructure and services continues to be the hard work.
4. Corporate Ireland Has A Strong Results Morning. Kingspan expects annual revenue to pass €10bn for the first time after H1 revenue rose 8% to €4.86bn and earnings climbed 9%. Glanbia’s EBITDA rose 14%, helped by booming protein demand, while Diageo is pairing $1bn of cost cuts with $1bn of Guinness investment over three years. Different businesses, but investors are rewarding companies showing exactly where growth and capital are going.
5. Dublin Business School Gets A New Chinese Owner. Hong Kong-listed China Chunlai Education has agreed to acquire Dublin Business School from Kaplan for $127.5m (€110.5m), subject to completion conditions. DBS teaches more than 9,000 students annually across six Dublin locations, while the transaction would be China Chunlai’s first acquisition outside China. Ireland’s education sector has now attracted another kind of foreign capital with an international operator buying a ready-made European platform.
World in 60 Seconds
Apollo has won the battle for EasyJet after Castlelake walked away, with the airline agreeing terms on a recommended £5.7bn (€6.6bn) cash acquisition expected to complete by the end of Q1 next year. London has another listings headache as Glencore considers an Australian listing, while Diageo shares rose more than 5% as new chief Dave Lewis pitched a simpler business, $1bn of cost cuts and a turnaround in struggling North America. Stripe founders Patrick and John Collison, early investors in highly leveraged AI hedge fund Situational Awareness, reportedly spent hours at its offices before it sold billions of dollars of AI stocks to Citadel following heavy losses. Across US law, Paul Weiss, Quinn Emanuel and Proskauer have explored structures that could bring private equity into their non-legal operations as recruitment and AI costs rise. And the AI spending race still needs financing: Alphabet is reportedly seeking up to $25bn in fresh bonds after more than $50bn of debt issuance in the first half, with 2026 capital expenditure now forecast at up to $205bn. Capital is still available, but investors are asking considerably more questions about where it ends up.
Today’s Sector Spotlight
Property & Energy
Property and energy enter the week weighing a genuine recovery against how far it actually reaches beneath the headline numbers.
Colm Lauder's analysis for the Business Post found the JLL Irish Property Index recording an 11.2% annual return to June, its ninth consecutive quarter of positive growth, with capital values up 4.8% and rental values up 5.4%. He cautioned this is not a broad lift from cheap money returning but concentrated performance, with one logistics portfolio worth close to €500m accounting for roughly a third of H1's €1.5bn investment turnover.
Dublin offices supplied the clearest evidence. The €110m sale of One Molesworth Street at a yield near 4.75% was the strongest prime pricing signal since 2022, with headline rents above €67.50 per square foot. But Lauder stressed this is not office-wide recovery: efficient, well-located buildings now sit in a different category to older stock needing refurbishment. Retail was the standout performer, up 9% in capital values and 9.5% in rental values, while residential stays constrained by financing costs and planning delays.
Outside Dublin, Cushman & Wakefield's regional research showed H1 take-up of roughly 20,400 sq m, down on 2025. Cork drove around two-thirds of that activity, led by Cork City Council's €35m purchase of the Counting House, with availability there at 9.3% overall but just 4.3% in the city centre. Galway and Limerick-Shannon saw thinner activity, with prime rents holding near €430 per square metre in both.
On energy, ESB reported 2025 after-tax profit of €636m, down from €706m as Storm Éowyn added roughly €95m in repair costs, while EirGrid's underlying profit slipped to €23.2m as it heads into a near €19bn transmission overhaul.
Watch whether September's trading confirms the recovery broadening beyond a small number of prime assets.
In Monday’s Tá, the Sector Spotlight will be Tech & AI.
The Rotation
Friday – The Week in Summary…
Ireland spent the week putting stronger headline numbers under a harsher spotlight. Manufacturing and services activity improved, EV registrations surged and tax receipts kept climbing, but domestic productivity remained weak, unemployment edged up and IFAC warned that spending is still running too hot. Capital kept moving too as Applegreen backed charging, Irish VC funding jumped, Glanbia and Kingspan delivered strong results, while Diageo paired deep cost cuts with heavy Guinness investment. Abroad, oil swung with every turn in US-Iran talks, EasyJet ended the week with a recommended Apollo takeover, and the AI boom kept pulling in extraordinary amounts of debt and investor money. Plenty moved forward this week, but the detail increasingly mattered more than the headline.
The Craic & the Scéal
Camogie is heading into its championship finale with the sort of audience numbers that make sponsors very happy. European football, meanwhile, is managing something rather less harmonious as UEFA says the conditions still have not been met to end its World Cup boycott, despite an apology from FIFA president Gianni Infantino. One sport is trying to grow the crowd; the other is still trying to get everyone into the same room under a general vibe of stopping corruption.
Worth Your Time
The Read – Business Post – One to watch: First time TD's accountancy skills shape new government procurement policy
The launch of Ireland's first National Procurement Strategy this week gave Albert Dolan's independent transparency work formal government backing. The Galway East TD had already published quarterly procurement data covering over €100bn in spending and drafted the Tender to Payment Bill, which would trace every contract from tender to final payment. Alongside Matt Fenlon, Dolan has spent the last two years building statespend.ie, tracking billions in state contract awards. Minister Chambers and Minister of State Frank Feighan's strategy also targets SME participation and bid-rigging, but that data thread is what turns spending figures into something the public can actually follow.
For the thinking behind the approach, Dolan's substack sets out the "Contract Delivery Test" underpinning it: https://albertdolan.substack.com/p/a-new-way-to-talk-about-public-spending
And for the scale of the problem, David McWilliams' podcast with Fenlon digs into why Ireland's €133bn budget still has no centralised way to trace it: https://shows.acast.com/the-david-mcwilliams-podcast/episodes/the-133-billion-black-hole-why-ireland-cant-track-its-spendi
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