Housing is back in the headlines this morning as a new report from estate agent Knight Frank warns supply is likely to lag demand for some time.
The company says just two local authorities have so far updated their development plans in line with the new Government policy on zoning, designed to increase output.
On the same subject, Paul Mitchell, director and cofounder of construction consultants Mitchell McDermott, has an opinion piece arguing 2026 finally presents the opportunity to turn the corner on a decade of underachievement on housing.
On Monday morning, a sell-off in stocks, gold and bonds deepened as shares in Asia fell in early trading as the US and Iran hardened their rhetoric and signalled a potential escalation to their conflict. Futures contracts indicate European and US shares are poised to follow later in the session.
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Meanwhile, new data from jobs platform LinkedIn this morning shows that while hiring levels in Ireland were down 7.2 per cent in January compared with 12 months earlier, the rate of decline here was softer than any other European market.
The data also shows demand for flexible work opportunities continued to soar here. Ireland had the highest level of remote job postings offered (10.9 per cent) and came second (34.2 per cent) in Europe for the proportion of hybrid positions advertised.
One person who likely won’t be looking for work anytime soon is Nadia Adan, the Ashford Motors founder and owner, who arrived here from Somalia as a refugee with her mother in 1997, escaping the war in that country.
Sitting beside a Ferrari 488 GTB in a pristine showroom in Co Wicklow, she talks to Emmet Ryan about being at the helm of a business that runs two garages, has more than 500,000 followers on social media, and is expected to clear €9 million in revenue in 2026.
While the jobs landscape is currently in fairly rude health, it wasn’t always thus. Many Irish people down the years have been forced to head for pastures new for work.
In his column this week, John FitzGerald looks at how Irish people are spread ever more widely across the globe, but argues the first-generation diaspora is shrinking as fewer young Irish people feel the need to emigrate.
On a separate subject entirely, FT columnist Emma Jacobs makes the case that plumbers have become the career talisman in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), as many question the value of a degree, especially with the burden of student debt.
On a related note, more than a third of Irish people believe AI bots are more trustworthy than humans, and that people are more upfront when talking to machines about their finances than they are when dealing with people in the real world. Conor Pope reports.
As we all know, the explosion in AI has put enormous pressure on electricity capacity, so it will be welcome news that renewable energy giant Statkraft has activated two new solar farms in Ireland, bringing the amount of solar energy it is feeding into the grid to above half a gigawatt.
In this week’s Q&A, a reader with a full state pension and €1.25 million in their private pension funds is wondering just how comfortable they will be in retirement.
Dominic Coyle says very few people worry about their pension until it is too late to do anything about it.
“Our earning capacity disappears, or reduces fairly sharply, and we start to consider how we will meet the cost of bills we have taken as routine to that point,” he says. “It’s rarely a comfortable review.”
In this week’s Me and My Money, co-founder of Cork Whiskey Fest Sonya O’Dwyer tells Tony Clayton-Lea about having to pull the plug on a business venture last year as it wasn’t performing as expected.
“It was a very tough decision to make and, although we lost money, we didn’t lose the respect of the people who worked with us, and that was far more important to us,” she said.
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