Thursday

Good morning. Ireland looks relatively confident this morning, but the small print is doing plenty of talking. AI is pushing professions up the value chain, debt is eating into infrastructure profits, public delivery is under scrutiny, and tech platforms are reminding Ireland that headquarters are for profits more than anything else. Let’s get into it.

1. Accountants Get The AI Pep Talk. Chartered Accountants Ireland says AI will not replace accountants, which is exactly the kind of line you issue when everyone has started quietly checking. The better read is that accountancy is moving up the value chain: less manual reconciliation, more judgement, audit challenge and client advice. For trainees, the safest skill is no longer being good at the spreadsheet, it is knowing when the spreadsheet is lying.

2. Ireland Is Selling Its Lawyers. Enda Kenny will chair Ireland for Law, the push to market Irish legal services abroad. The pitch is tidy: common law, EU membership, English language and a courts system multinational clients already recognise. This is Ireland trying to export more than tax structures and aircraft leases. Lawyers should pay attention, the next good file may come from being Europe-facing, not just Dublin-busy.

3. The Broadband Bill Is Biting. Eir’s first-quarter profits operating profit saw a 20% increase; however, net profit fell 45% as finance costs doubled. That is the less glamorous side of infrastructure: you can add fibre, customers, and revenue, then watch debt costs eat the applause. The lesson is blunt: growth funded in cheap-money years now needs proper margin discipline or else risk scaring shareholders.

4. Public Delivery Is Under The Microscope. An Post is talking sustainability progress with 50% of its fleet now electric powered, RTÉ is back before committees providing its usual free entertainment, and the National Children’s Hospital remains the national case study in how big projects become bigger arguments. Ireland is great at modernisation announcements; delivering it is the expensive bit. The easy-growth era is over; Ireland now has to prove it can do judgement, delivery and trust, not just hiring, headlines and cheap capital.

5. Platforms Keep Cutting The Cushion. X’s Irish arm declared €682.8m in dividends to its parent last year despite a €240.5m pre-tax loss in 2024, the same year it was taken private and staff numbers were reduced from 375 in 2022 to 108. Meta has now told Government up to 350 Irish jobs are at risk, about 20% locally versus a 10% global cut. The Irish tech “safe base” looks less safe, a reminder that for multinationals Ireland is for profiteering , not just high-skilled workers.

Markets got their AI sugar hit as Nvidia forecast $91bn in quarterly revenue and an $80bn buyback, though investors still managed to look mildly traumatised by perfection. Oil cooled as Trump talked up Iran deal progress, but Reuters reports Hormuz traffic remains hostage to checkpoints, fees and diplomatic queue-skipping. The EU and US are still trying to avoid a tariff punch-up, which matters when Irish exporters are already budgeting for too many unknowns. EasyJet cut first-half losses, useful near-neighbour evidence that travel demand has not fully lost the run of itself. The world looks steadier this morning, but mostly because the risks have learned to queue politely.

Health & Pharma 

The gap between Ireland's pharmaceutical strength and its health system capacity is wider this week than it was last, and the data on both sides has sharpened.

Globally, pharma restructuring continues to bite. Takeda confirmed 4,500 job cuts as part of a transformation programme targeting $1.3 billion in annual savings, with the reductions concentrated in corporate functions rather than manufacturing. Takeda employs more than 1,000 people across four Irish sites, including its first European oral solid dosage facility in Bray and its first API site outside Japan at Grange Castle. The company has not confirmed Irish exposure, but the direction of travel in global pharma cost-cutting is toward corporate and back-office roles, which exist on every major campus.

The contrast from Craigavon is instructive. Almac Group, the privately owned contract development and manufacturing organisation headquartered in Northern Ireland, reported record revenues of £1.1 billion for the year ended September 2025, with pre-tax profit up 16% and its global workforce growing to more than 7,900, more than half of whom are based on the island of Ireland. As a CDMO, Almac's model is structurally different from a branded pharma, but its trajectory underlines that contract manufacturing and services capacity is still in demand.

The domestic workforce picture, meanwhile, is getting harder to ignore. An ESRI report published Monday projects that up to 3,327 additional HSE primary and community care workers will be needed by 2040, with the largest gaps in public health nursing, occupational therapy and audiology. Health unions told an Oireachtas committee today that low morale is already undermining retention. The HSE cannot recruit its way to Sláintecare targets if the system is losing experienced staff at the same that it is projecting demand growth. Quite the paradox there.  

Watch whether Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill's response to the ESRI report translates into a funded workforce plan before Budget 2027 negotiations close the door on new current spending commitments.

In Friday’s Tá, the Sector Spotlight will be Property & Energy.

Thursday – The Deal Desk…

Better Futures – The NovaUCD AI company founded in 2023, has raised €600k from angel investors and Enterprise Ireland's HPSU programme, bringing total funding to €1.1 million. Its platform, EVA, automates audit-ready engineering documentation for regulated industries. Its customers include ABB and Bausch + Lomb.

GagaMuller – The data centre project management firm, announced 70 new jobs as part of a €2 million expansion, with AWS, Microsoft, Meta and Google on its client list.

No Name (Yet) – Google and Blackstone announced a $5 billion joint venture to build an as-yet-unnamed AI cloud company offering TPU chips as compute-as-a-service, with 500 megawatts targeted by 2027.

Over a decade on from Ireland’s first permanent roller coaster at then Tayto Park, Emerald Park is opening Lost Valley: Land of Dinosaurs on June 6, complete with a 12-metre Swing’o’Saurus, because apparently the only thing missing from Meath was Jurassic mild peril – nevertheless, it sounds like tremendous craic. UEFA, meanwhile, wants fewer mismatch qualifiers for 2030, which may deny Ireland the sacred joy of squeezing a 0-0 moral victory out of a tiny nation before somehow terrifying a giant. All the while, Paul Rudd says he is “pretty vocal” about loving Ireland after filming Power Ballad in Dublin, the same Crumlin-shot production mentioned on Tuesday.

TThe Read – The Irish Times – Nama earned €78m profit last year ahead of likely winding up

NAMA published its final annual report this morning, and the numbers deserve more than a headline glance.

The Dáil is now considering the National Treasury Management Agency (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill, 2026, which would formally dissolve NAMA before year end, transferring a residual portfolio of under €80 million and five live legal cases to an NTMA resolution unit. The agency delivered €5.6 billion in lifetime transfers to the State across 15 consecutive profitable years, a figure that looked impossible when it was established in 2009 to absorb €74 billion in distressed loans.

For anyone in property, finance or public policy, this is a clean institutional autopsy worth reading while the subject is still breathing. Link: Nama earned €78m profit last year ahead of likely winding up

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