Austin Hughes

And a significant amount of that gap is accounted for by our spending on housing.

The CSO says that there was 8.8 billion of a gap between income and consumption.

And they reckon around 5.8 of that was spent on housing, another billion spent on pensions.

And the amount of that increase in deposits between June and September was around 2 billion.

So it's not putting huge amounts by, it's trying to afford purchasing houses in Ireland that's behind a lot of the rise in the savings ratio.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, not a flash in the pan.

Last year, we were second to Spain.

This time we're second to Portugal.

It maps out various elements, whether core inflation is very high.

And we talked about that being a global phenomenon, how many parts of inflation are higher.

GDP, and in Ireland's case, they strip out GDP, they use modified domestic demand, employment growth, which is a key element, and stock market performance.

And in that they find us coming second to Portugal, way ahead of laggards like Germany, Japan, the UK, the US.

So, you know, it's good news that's often suggested that the Irish economy is purely a product of the

the multinational sector.

But this is suggesting that at least in terms of macro terms, the Irish economy has done quite well in 2025 again.

Yeah, the Irish Times reports a series of meetings between the spring and the summer between the pharma industry and the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste.

And it concludes that the pharma industry got as much as it could possibly have hoped to expect and that pharma lobbyists then are well worth their Christmas bonus.

Now, what they're talking about is that

The pharma industry raised concerns around, obviously, US tariffs, but also around EU proposals to reduce the number of years that companies have exclusive rights to sell new medicines they develop before generic competition can enter the market.