68% of workers aged between 20 and 69 have some form of pension cover outside of the State pension, new figures from the Central Statistics Office show. The number of people taking out a pension increases with age, according to the data. Just 33% of those aged between 20 to 24 had supplementary cover between…

The commercial property vacancy rate nationally has increased to its highest level since GeoDirectory started tracking the data a decade ago. According to its latest Commercial Buildings Report, the vacancy rate increased by 0.3 percentage points to 14.3% in the year to the end of December. In total, there were 30,046 empty commercial units across…

While tracker and variable mortgage customers have borne the brunt of the European Central Bank’s interest rate raising programme, those who managed to fix at the right time have remained largely insulated from its historically high interest rates. According to the Central Bank, Irish banks’ fixed mortgage customer were enjoying an average interest rate of…

The World Trade Organization today opened a high-level ministerial meeting in Abu Dhabi with calls for consensus as geopolitical tensions and the looming US election undermine chances of a major breakthrough. The WTO’s 13th ministerial conference (MC13), scheduled to run until Thursday in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is the first…

Consumer sentiment fell again in February, undoing some of the gains it made a month earlier. The Credit Union Consumer Sentiment Index dropped to 70.2 in the month, down from 74.2 in January. The research’s author, Austin Hughes, said the dip in sentiment is not surprising as the gain in January was significant, but most…

The competition to select a city to host the new EU Anti-Money Laundering Agency (AMLA) will get underway in Brussels today, with Dublin in contention along with eight other cities. Ireland is competing against eight other member states – France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania and Austria – to host the agency, which would…

Ireland’s national debt continued to fall last year but remains one of the highest in the world at €42,000 per capita, the Department of Finance’s report on public debt shows. Only Japan, Belgium and Italy have higher levels of borrowings per person. The country’s gross public debt stood at €223 billion in 2023 down from…

The vast majority of Irish tech start-up and scaling companies are deploying or preparing to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) according to a new survey. The research from Scale Ireland also shows that finance is still the biggest challenge facing indigenous founders. The 2024 State of Start-ups Survey reveals that 82% of respondents are deploying or…

There has been a 71% global spike in cyber-attacks involving stolen identities according to IBM. Its latest X-Force Threat Intelligence Index found there was a growing trend in 2023 of cyber-criminals logging into corporate networks using stolen credentials as opposed to hacking into systems. The report is based on insights and observations from monitoring over…

Mortgage lending at credit unions was up 15% in the last three months of the year, with the mortgage book now over €500m for the first time. The Irish League of Credit Unions represents 92% of the total active credit unions here. Its quarterly results show an overall increase in lending across all areas of…