ONE MORE THING:AVIVA MIGHT be retrenching from the Irish market but its name will continue to adorn the former Lansdowne Road stadium until 2020 at least.
Aviva paid €44 million to the IRFU and the FAI for the 10-year naming rights in a landmark deal. Stadium sources tell me that there is no break clause in the sponsorship deal.
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Tom Morrisroe’s The Now Factory didn’t land an award at last night’s Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards but the telecoms executive is unlikely to have been too disappointed. The company he founded in 2006 has just posted accounts for last year which show it generated a pre-tax profit of just over €2 million, up from €1.3 million the year before.
A profitable Irish tech start-up? That surely makes The Now Factory unique.
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Figures for Dublin airport for the first half of 2011 support the view that visitor numbers have rebounded. Between January and June, an extra 550,000 foreign-originating passengers passed through the airport, according to data compiled by RedC. That is a 16 per cent rise on last year. The bad news is the number of Irish-based passengers fell 1 per cent.
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Ken Hutton, a former colleague of mine at News International, is back in town. Hutton returned from London this week to take up the role of commercial director with Bay Broadcasting, which is heavily involved in commercial radio here, notably with 4FM and Radio Nova.
