Jude Weber

speaker

82 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 10 Jun

Jude Weber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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FT News Briefing · SpaceX shoots for the moon with $1.78tn IPO · 10 Jun 2026 podcast

Every time it sets its budget, it then doesn't respect that budget and overspends.

So what this means is that despite having budget surpluses, and the budget surplus this year is expected to be €9.2 billion,

The surpluses are going to be too small to make the contributions that the government has promised into the rainy day funds to pay for future challenges, pensions, climate, infrastructure and all of these things.

And the result is that in order to save into those funds, they're going to have to borrow 30 billion euros more between now and the end of the decade.

And that's ironic because it's a time when the economy is performing well, corporation tax revenues are still performing very well.

So it just seems a bit odd that Ireland would have to borrow in order to save.

Well, the government says it's being very, very prudent and it's balancing the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow.

But the fact is that the more money you have, the more sort of irresistible pressure you have to spend.

I think the thing is that, you know, people, especially in the opposition, people look at the fact that Ireland has so much money coming in and think that there are so many problems, you know, the health service, there are problems in education, roads, energy, you name it.

So people think there's tons of money to be spent on everything.

The real problem with all of this is that the corporation tax is very, very concentrated.

It's in just three companies and they're widely believed to be Eli Lilly, Microsoft and Apple pay almost 50% of Ireland's corporation tax.

So if anything were to happen, you know, if their profits go down and they pay less corporation tax, or if they were to up sticks and leave from Ireland, which is obviously not expected at the moment, but if anything were to happen, then, you know, this would be very, very damaging for Ireland's public finances.

Thanks, Mark.

FT News Briefing · Blockbuster IPOs to take Wall Street by storm · 22 May 2026 podcast

It's desperate.

The energy situation is just incredibly dire at the moment, and it's been getting worse all year.

So in January, President Trump threatened sanctions on any country that sent oil or gas or fuel to Cuba.

And then in the

Fuel oil and diesel ran out completely.

And this has knock-on effects on everything.

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