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The Digital Services Commissioner at media regulator Coimisiún na Meán will tell an Oireachtas committee that it is not their job to act as an online censor. John Evans is due to appear before the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise to discuss the operation and resourcing of Coimisiún na Meán. Earlier this month, the regulator assumed…

A new estimate suggests that the domestic economy here grew reasonably strongly in December, despite challenging conditions. The “Nowcast”, produced by the Economic and Social Research Institute, predicts that Modified Domestic Demand (MDD) expanded by 3.7% in the month. That is up from 2.5% estimated for November. MDD is a measure of domestic economic activity…

The commercial property vacancy rate nationally has increased to its highest level since GeoDirectory started tracking the data a decade ago. According to its latest Commercial Buildings Report, the vacancy rate increased by 0.3 percentage points to 14.3% in the year to the end of December. In total, there were 30,046 empty commercial units across…

68% of workers aged between 20 and 69 have some form of pension cover outside of the State pension, new figures from the Central Statistics Office show. The number of people taking out a pension increases with age, according to the data. Just 33% of those aged between 20 to 24 had supplementary cover between…

Consumer sentiment fell again in February, undoing some of the gains it made a month earlier. The Credit Union Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to 70.2 in the month, down from 74.2 in January. The research’s author, Austin Hughes, said the dip in sentiment is not surprising as the gain in January was significant, but most…

The World Trade Organization today opened a high-level ministerial meeting in Abu Dhabi with calls for consensus as geopolitical tensions and the looming US election undermine chances of a major breakthrough. The WTO’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13), scheduled to run until Thursday in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is the first…

While tracker and variable mortgage customers have borne the brunt of the European Central Bank’s interest rate raising programme, those who managed to fix at the right time have remained largely insulated from its historically high interest rates. According to the Central Bank, Irish banks’ fixed mortgage customer were enjoying an average interest rate of…

The vast majority of Irish tech start-up and scaling companies are deploying or preparing to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) according to a new survey. The research from Scale Ireland also shows that finance is still the biggest challenge facing indigenous founders. The 2024 State of Start-ups Survey reveals that 82% of respondents are deploying or…

Ireland’s national debt continued to fall last year but remains one of the highest in the world at €42,000 per capita, the Department of Finance’s report on public debt shows. Only Japan, Belgium and Italy have higher levels of borrowings per person. The country’s gross public debt stood at €223 billion in 2023 down from…

The competition to select a city to host the new EU Anti-Money Laundering Agency (AMLA) will get underway in Brussels today, with Dublin in contention along with eight other cities. Ireland is competing against eight other member states – France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania and Austria – to host the agency, which would…