Business News

A state-rescued bank has been accused of exploiting its mortgage customers by offering those who want to fix an interest rate that is more than double what other banks are charging. The bank has a two-year fixed rate of 7.25pc for existing residential customers. Its three-year rate is 8.75pc. It comes as there are fears […]

A rush to get approved for a mortgage, with first-time buyers to the fore, is expected to push house prices up by 10pc this year. Changes to Central Bank lending rules and the introduction of the Government’s help-to-buy scheme at the start of the year have resulted in a surge in people applying to take […]

Irish Life has restated its commitment to the Dublin office market with a decision to pre-fund the €125m development of 13-18 City Quay in the docklands. The 118,000sq ft office building – which will be built by Bennett Construction – has been pre-let to business advisory specialists Grant Thornton, and ownership of the property will […]

With only a month left for taxpayers to make voluntary disclosures about offshore assets, there’s likely to be a surge in calls to the Revenue Commissioners’ dedicated helpline in coming weeks. Revenue Commissioners said yesterday that about 2,000 calls have so far been made to its helpline, which was established after Finance Minister Michael Noonan […]

Labour costs in Ireland are rising at one of the slowest rates in the EU despite the country’s strong economic performance. Ireland is currently the fastest-growing economy in western Europe, yet the latest data from Eurostat shows that wage costs in the country rose by just 1.1pc in the last three months of last year. […]

Ireland is one of the countries “leading the race to the bottom” in the facilitation of global tax avoidance, according to a new report from charity group Oxfam. Oxfam said there “is strong evidence” that Ireland is aiding significant corporate-tax-avoidance schemes for European banks. In a report titled ‘Opening the Vaults’, researchers at Oxfam, in […]

Irish-based companies are among the biggest foreign owners of UK firms, ahead of Japan and well ahead of rising powerhouse China. More than one-in-four of the UK’s most important businesses are foreign owned, according to figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). The data shows as many as 24,145 UK businesses are owned […]

The price of an average semi-detached house in parts of Dublin is inflating as fast as in the boom years and the period immediately before the Central Bank introduced its lending restrictions two-and-a-half years ago. Prices in North County and South County Dublin both increased by 5.6pc in the three months since December, while Dublin […]

Public sector workers get paid 40pc more on average than their private sector counterparts, a report claims. By contrast, in the UK public sector pay is almost on a par with the private sector, with Ireland’s public/private pay gap high by European standards, the paper states. The study by Davy Stockbrokers argues that any future […]

On Wednesday, the UK prime minister is scheduled to ­’trigger’ Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union to announce to the 27 other EU member states that the UK intends to leave the union. It will be no surprise. On June 23 last a majority of voters in the UK and Gibraltar voted in […]