Jubilation on streets of Athenry but saga could still end in tears

“Onwards and upwards!” shouted publican Martin Morrissey to cheers from other locals in Athenry, Co Galway, this week after Apple’s planned data centre cleared its final hurdle in the High Court.

The streets of the town were brimming with optimism, with a butcher promising half price fillet steak as part of an "Athenry Apple Special". Paul Keane, who helped set up the Athenry for Apple campaign, said: "We can see the end of the road now."

But it’s a long way from Athenry to Silicon Valley, and the end of that road could yet be farther away than the locals think. Apple’s top brass was silent following the ruling despite requests from journalists for clarification on the company’s intentions.

Apple first announced plans to build the centre in conjunction with another facility in Denmark. That was almost three years ago, and while the Danish facility is nearing completion not a brick has been laid in the west of Ireland.

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More alarmingly for proponents of the €850 million plan, Apple has since announced plans for a second Danish centre, and the concern is that the tech giant has decided to wash its hands of the Irish planning system.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was in California this week to drum up investment, and met Apple chief executive Tim Cook to discuss the matter.

“I will be keen to speak to Apple about their commitment to the project,” he said. “Certainly when I met them last in Dublin they told me that they planned to go ahead, subject to legal challenges. It does appear now that those legal challenges are resolved, although there is still a possibility of an appeal to the Supreme Court.”

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The news that Irish banks are making bigger profits on mortgage lending than those in any other euro zone state will have stuck in the craw of anyone caught up in the tracker scandal.

A European Central Bank analysis of margins on mortgage lending across Europe, which is the differential between what banks pay out on deposit accounts and earn on loan products, showed that margins of banks based in Ireland are highest at 3.1425 per cent.

Meanwhile, Bank of Scotland, which introduced ECB tracker mortgages to the Irish market in 2001, disclosed that it has identified 184 customers who were impacted by an industry-wide overcharging controversy going back almost a decade.

"We have completed a review of our tracker mortgages as requested by the Central Bank of Ireland, and have identified a small number of accounts with errors relating to tracker interest rates," a spokesman for the company told The Irish Times.

It separately emerged that AIB is offering to allow a family back into their repossessed home following an examination of the case in the bank's tracker mortgage review. The bank repossessed the home around the start of 2015, and it has been vacant since then. The property, in the south of Ireland, is one of 14 identified by the bank in its review of tracker mortgages as having been repossessed in error.

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Possibly not unconnected to the Taoiseach’s visit to the US west coast, it was a bumper week for job announcements.

Top of the list was social media group Facebook ,which announced it could hire as many as 800 additional staff next year to add to its current Dublin team of 2,200.

US-based communications tech company Twilio also announced 100 positions at its new EMEA HQ in Dublin – a substantial investment for a group that employs 800 people worldwide. Twenty of those positions are already filled, with the company actively recruiting for the other 80.

Meanwhile, chipmaker Xilinx is adding 100 new position to the 350 staff it has in Dublin and Cork.

Earlier in the week Theravance Biophamra said it would treble the numbers at its newly-opened Dublin office with the appointment of 20 new staff.

But even outside the trade mission, there was good news on the jobs front with aircraft maintenance group Dublin Aerospace saying that it will recruit 150 people over the next three years and Aer Lingus fielding as many as 3,000 applications for the 100 new pilot slots it is filling.

That’s close to 1,300 jobs for an economy already approaching “full” employment. Not a bad week’s work.

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They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Ryanair’s public relations strategy over the years has often seemed wedded to that particular cliché. However, a study by Core Media, Ireland’s largest buyer of advertising, found the airline’s brand image plunged last month following its flights cancellation crisis.

It said Ryanair recorded one of the biggest drops in brand "vitality" it has ever witnessed. "For the first time ever Ryanair's brand sentiment went negative," said Core Media strategic planner Thomas Geoghegan.

However, while the airline’s brand sentiment plunged its visibility jumped to 80 per cent, which was the highest ever. “This tells us that Ryanair stood out in people’s minds more strongly than ever before, but for all the wrong reasons,” said Core.

Michael O’Leary won’t have been too worried though. Ryanair shares climbed almost 7 per cent on Tuesday after the airline reported an 11 per cent rise in net profit to €1.3 billion in the six months to September 30th.

Sales were 7 per cent higher at €4.4 billion during the period, which is the first half of Ryanair’s financial year, from €4.1 billion over the same period last year. Its shares rose 6 per cent following the news.

There was more good news on passenger traffic, which grew by 8 per cent in October to 11.8 million customers, the same volume the low-cost airline carried in September. Almost 1 million new customers used the airline in comparison to October 2016.

However, it is still grappling with an industrial relations crisis. Ryanair pilots in Belfast, Glasgow Prestwick and Bournemouth in England were this week said to be among 10 bases that have voted for an increased pay offer from the airline.

The Irish carrier says it will spend €100 million a year on recruiting pilots and boosting pay. However, those at one of its biggest bases, London Stansted, recently rejected an offer that Ryanair maintains will make them 20 per cent better off than counterparts.

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Following the disastrous nature of the investigation into former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive Seán FitzPatrick's activities at the bank earlier this year, the Government has moved to overhaul how the State goes about dealing with alleged white collar crime.

Banks and other financial institutions will face a stricter monitoring regime, while the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE), which was severely criticised for its work on the Fitzpatrick case, is to be effectively disbanded.

The new renamed ODCE will be allowed recruit more specialist staff, and will be recast to “give it a similar structure to a commission” rather than a normal State agency. That means a chief commissioner will be in charge, aided by other assistant commissioners.

Other measures will be aimed at bringing about quicker and more effective prosecutions in corruption and bribery cases. There will also be measures to strengthen the oversight and governance of corporations and executives.

Despite the decidedly patchy record on holding bankers individually to account, former British prime minister Gordon Brown was singing Ireland’s praises when it comes to tackling white collar crime. He called on the UK to follow Ireland’s lead in prosecuting rogue bankers.

In his new book, My Life, Our Times: the Memoirs of Gordon Brown, published on Tuesday, Brown argued that "scores" of cheating British bankers, including directors of Northern Rock, should be put in prison.

Separately, a judge directed the acquittal of former Anglo Irish Bank executive Tiarnan O’Mahoney, who was accused of fraud and of conspiring to destroy, mutilate or falsify records of accounts allegedly connected to FitzPatrick.