The calm before the Budget storm

05 September 2026

Good morning. Budget 2027 lands tomorrow, so today is the calm before the storm. Before that takes over everything, there was plenty moving over the weekend, from a late twist in the PTSB sale to fresh Budget negotiations and a few sizeable business developments. We’ll start with the Weekend Round-Up before getting into today’s Top 5. Let’s get into it.

Monday - The Weekend Round-Up…

Starting Friday evening, PTSB picked up an unexpected complication after Axis said it was considering a possible €3.20-a-share offer, above Bawag’s agreed €2.97 deal. That sounds significant, but Axis has not secured funding, while Bawag’s transaction is already much further through the process ahead of a High Court sanction hearing on 27 October. This morning, PTSB responded saying it is fully focused on its agreed sale to Bawag.

Budget 2027 also moved into its final stretch, with negotiations covering the minimum wage and a reported €150m allocation from the National Training Fund for AI-related skills and training.

Elsewhere, the HSE faces the gradual loss of around €310m in annual private-insurance income as public-only consultant contracts change how treatment is funded. German asset manager DWS is also looking to sell more than €300m of Irish property as investors redeem money from one of its funds, including a roughly €220m apartment portfolio close to agreement with Kennedy Wilson.

Quite a busy weekend before Tuesday’s Budget gets a chance to take over the week.

1. Multinationals Keep Filling The Tax Tank. Ireland collected €78.9bn in tax through September, up 10.7% year-on-year, with corporation tax reaching €22.7bn, 24.2% ahead of last year. ISME says that leaves the State too reliant on multinational receipts. International firms are still arriving too, with Canadian company Blitz Franchise choosing Waterford for its new European base. It is a very healthy tax position heading into Budget day, but it also shows just how much of the State’s financial strength now depends on multinational business. While it looks sustainable now, the long-term prospect of maintaining this level of taxation is uncertain.

2. Business Outside Dublin Has Plenty Going On. Roscommon-based Dunbar Pharma plans to enter the UK and Germany after raising €11m, while Cork legal-tech company Bundledocs has been acquired by London-based Opus 2 after growing to 1,900 clients across 35 countries. Barry English is also putting serious private capital behind Irish hospitality. His Johnstown Collection owed him €21m at the end of 2025, an unsecured and interest-free director loan, after he brought Johnstown Estate, Trim Castle Hotel and the €50m Mount Juliet Estate together under one group. The regional story here is businesses scaling through exports, acquisitions and owners willing to reinvest significant capital.

3. Dublin Businesses Are Still Spending To Grow. Brown Thomas Arnotts made €23.5m after tax and is considering investing more than €2m to turn its fast-growing Planet Beauty concept into a standalone online offering to target the younger market. Joe Duffy Group grew turnover 6% to €573m and pre-tax profit 3% to €30.9m, while remaining open to acquisitions in Ireland and the UK and further franchise opportunities. There is a caveat though. Dunne & Crescenzi has closed its Dundrum restaurant, its second closure in nine months, although the wider group remains profitable and continues trading from South Frederick Street.

4. Irish Funds Wants Deemed Disposal Gone, Not Trimmed. Budget 2027 is reportedly set to cut the deemed-disposal rate on investment funds from 38% to 35%, but Irish Funds chief Pat Lardner says reducing the rate misses the bigger problem and wants the eight-year rule removed altogether. The Government’s new Savings and Investment Account is expected to allow funds and ETFs to be held without deemed disposal, so the rule should not interfere with that particular effort to get households investing more. Nonetheless, it is still an underwhelming outcome for everybody investing outside the new account - the rate may be lower, but the rather silly practice of taxing gains before an investment has even been sold remains.

5. Revolut Is Repricing The Race For Irish Investors. Revolut is cutting its Trading Pro subscription from €15 to €4.99 a month and introducing a €1 flat commission outside customers’ trading allowances. Standard and Plus customers are also set to lose their free monthly trades. With Irish customers holding around €1.2bn in investment portfolios on the platform, this is more than a fintech pricing tweak. Revolut is making a more direct play for active investors and their money.

The International Energy Agency says 325m of the 400m barrels pledged from emergency reserves in March have now been released, while G7 countries have also agreed a further 100m-barrel action with diesel front-loaded as disruption from the US-Iran conflict continues to squeeze fuel markets. The US has also backed away from a threatened diesel export ban, which matters for Europe as a major net importer. Elsewhere, Brazil is heading for a 25 October presidential run-off after Flavio Bolsonaro (yes, another one) finished the first round on about 47% to Lula’s 45%, while Donald Trump has created a new “Super Intelligence Force” to coordinate US AI policy under intelligence chief Jay Clayton. Revolut is also reshaping its trading fees across Europe, while Mattel has reportedly attracted takeover interest from Authentic Brands Group. The oil release is the big one this morning as governments are now moving from talking about fuel-market pressure to actually putting strategic reserves into it.

Tech & AI

The AI industry is lining up for public markets while its safety record gets cross-examined.

Anthropic is the anchor in this story. Bloomberg reports it could begin formal IPO marketing as soon as the week of 09 November, to list before Thanksgiving on 26 November, with investors reportedly eyeing a $1.8tn to $2tn valuation. Its prospectus shows Broadcom agreeing to lend up to $42bn for chip leasing, in debt that could convert into shares, though no notes are expected to be sold before the IPO. Anthropic flags conflicts of interest, as Broadcom is also its supplier. Bloomberg reported a 2025 net loss of almost $42bn on revenue of about $4.6bn, with more than $34bn of the loss from an accounting revaluation of liabilities. A new Founder LLC of its seven co-founders is designed to insulate leaders from market forces.

Meanwhile OpenAI is holding back its GPT-6.1 Astra model over safeguards, and the FTC is reportedly preparing information demands to OpenAI, Anthropic and others, which are requests, not findings. A White House accord backing outside auditors is non-binding.

DeepSeek has open-sourced Huawei Ascend chip tools, including TileLang, China's answer to Nvidia's CUDA, and reportedly plans at least 160,000 Ascend accelerators in Inner Mongolia.

In Ireland, Indeed says nearly 5% of job postings mention data centres, roughly double the 2019 to 2025 share and the highest of ten European countries analysed.

Watch whether the FTC sends its demands in the coming weeks, and whether Anthropic's marketing starts the week of 09 November.

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

The Central Bank has put Maeve Binchy on a €15 commemorative coin, although actually owning one will set you back €129.95, which feels like a fairly aggressive interpretation of face value. Wetherspoon says sunny weather helped sales across its British pubs, proving that even a listed pub chain can sometimes be one decent weekend away from a better trading update. Leo Varadkar is also warning that Ireland has too few major infrastructure projects in the pipeline. Given he only left the Taoiseach’s office about two and a half years ago, there may be a few people wondering whether someone could have had a word with the previous Government.
A more wholesome note to finish. Tributes to press photographer Colin Keegan, who died at the weekend, described someone who spent his career recording the “heart, soul and history of Ireland”. The people behind the camera rarely become the story themselves, but the job matters because somebody has to preserve the moments everyone else eventually remembers.

The Read – Business Post – John Cronin: Monzo has proven it can win customers, and little else. Where it goes next is unclear (Requires Free Account)

Nubank's (Brazilian digital banking firm) denial that it is pursuing a takeover leaves open what Monzo is actually worth. John Cronin's analysis argues the answer depends on revenue quality. Monzo made £87m (€102m) pre-tax profit in its latest year across more than 16 million UK customers, but 68% of revenue is net interest income and it lends under 10p for every £1 deposited. Cronin doubts private equity or an IPO would support the reported £8bn to £10bn price talk and asks where durable revenue comes from as Spain becomes the next market. Relevant for anyone tracking Monzo's Irish launch. Link: Monzo has proven it can win customers, and little else. Where it goes next is unclear

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