Friday's business news review
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Breakfast Business with Enterprise Ireland on Newstalk. Morning, Joe. How are you? I'm not too bad. Austin, looking forward to the weekend. How did you guys get on? Shelburne.
How do we get on? We drew, so we did a little bit better than your guys last night, but it's a long road yet ahead and fingers crossed both teams will do well over the next little while.
Yeah, indeed. At least you're there in the Conference League. A lot of clubs didn't make it. Anyway, let us start with some interesting comments made by the former boss of Glendimplex and now the chair of the ESRA about planning objections. That's in the Irish Times this morning.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is a really interesting and very strong piece. He was speaking at a British Irish Chamber of Commerce event yesterday and he referred to what he called industrial scale objections being taken in the planning process here. The event also heard that in the UK there were 66 companies high court challenges taken in 2024. In Ireland, there were 125. And just doing my sums this morning, if the UK did the same amount as Ireland, rather than 66, it would have about 800. So we're about 12 times as likely to have high court challenges on planning as our near neighbours.
With the same legal system.
Yeah, well, same legal system. But again, the conference heard that there's differences that it's harder to get. It doesn't allow for third party objections in the UK. And getting your legal costs paid is also trickier in the UK. Again, Mr. O'Driscoll talked about some planning applications for major projects running to 30,000 pages. And he said this leads to loads of potential pitfalls along that.
What are the latest insights on planning objections in Ireland?
On a slightly more optimistic note, at the same event, the Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers said that planning reforms due to come out in future weeks are likely to be more important than who gets what in Budget 2026. So let's wait and see. But the scale of the problem, very evident in these sort of numbers.
Absolutely. And of course, it comes on the same day that Metrolink, the metro service for Dublin Airport, has got the green light. How many people out there think that that won't face a judicial review and go straight to shovels in the ground?
There will be a lot of yellow lights and possibly deep amber, maybe red lights. But before we actually see those, the metro running, I think, you know, fingers crossed.
Yeah. Now let's move to the services sector. It appears to be holding firm.
Yeah, much better news here from AIB's Purchasing Managers Index. The growth in activity and new business in the services sector was the fastest in four months in September. Employment also improved. Now it's not across the entire sector. A lot of the heavy lifting done from by the technology, media and telecoms sector that had its best month in two years. Business services, financial services also improving, but transport, tourism and leisure down as they have been for the last couple of months. So a mixed bag. But in general, the economy here continues to do well.
Yeah. And of course, the services sector is the single most important sector in the Irish economy, accounting for what is it, 70 or 75 percent of the economy?
Yeah, like most economies now, we tend to talk an awful lot about manufacturing, but services is the lion's share of activity and employment, really critical in that regard.
And it includes retail. Tesco has raised its profit outlook and that comes amid quite high grocery price inflation.
Yeah, this is quite an interesting one. Now, Tesco UK raised its profit outlook and said that price cuts on six and a half thousand items, that average nine percent had seen them have a strong first half of their year. And in that regard, they're raising their profit outlook. The Tesco Ireland CEO, Geoff Byrne, also said they had a strong performance in the first half. Now, he cites sales growth of 4.8% that I assume is like for like. Cantor is talking about overall spending in the grocery market by 6%. He also, the Irish CEO, also cites strong food sales, but it's not clear whether that is largely due to...
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