The State’s affordable housing developer, the Land Development Agency, says it has started exploring the purchase of sites for housing outside cities in a bid to encourage more regional development. Killian Woods reports that the agency will likely spend €200 million on development land this year.
Killian also writes that Tetrarch Capital has secured permission for the demolition and redevelopment of the Deer Park Hotel in Howth. It comes after its plan for the site was reconsidered by An Coimisiún Pleanála following a judicial review.
Consumer protection has featured very little in talk about Tánaiste Simon Harris’s proposed new personal investment accounts, the Society of Actuaries has warned, with talk of stock-picking - investing in individual companies’ shares - too prominent. Its comments come despite its backing for the proposal.
Staff at a Limerick cafe waited nearly two years to get their share of over €5,000 in customer gratuities from a tap-to-tip machine that neither the owner nor the manager admitted putting in place. The big winner, writes Stephen Bourke, was the machine provider whose fees ate up a quarter of all the money collected.
Food giant Nestlé has sold its infant formula plant in Askeaton, Co Limerick, to US pharmaceuticals group Pfanstiehl, which only formally established a corporate presence here in January. The plant’s 500-plus former workers now have to wait to find out its plans for the site.
Sticking with AI, hundreds of millions of people worldwide who have embraced chatbots for web search, work and healthcare are still trying to understand the privacy implications of conversing with AI companions. Brian Chen offers four prompts to understand what the chatbots have figured out about you.
In the world of work, Margaret E Ward writes that we are working harder than ever, but the traditional expectation that productivity and wages move in tandem is no longer true. Instead, the gap between workers and chief executives continues to widen significantly.
Maureen King was head of fraud and security at Meteor and later Eir. When she left, she teamed up with senior former Garda Peter Kirwan to establish iTrust 6A, a legal tech start-up that helps organisations manage requests from law enforcement for access to data relevant to their investigations.
On this week’s Inside Business podcast, after the report last week on how much we need for a comfortable retirement, PwC partner Munro O’Dwyer joins host Cliff Taylor to explain when you should start contributing to a pension and at what age you should ramp up those contributions.
Also, Cliff and markets correspondent Joe Brennan tease out what’s next for PTSB as shareholders gather on Thursday to vote on the proposed takeover by Austrian bank Bawag.
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