Offer for Bleeding Horse, facial recognition issues and Apple’s recycling robots

A British investment firm has made an offer, believed to be close to €9.4 million, to buy the landmark Bleeding Horse pub in Dublin city. Attestor Capital, a London firm that has bought six other well-known Dublin pubs in a little more than a year, recently made the offer to the consortium of local investors that owns the huge pub at the top of Camden Street, adjacent to one of the city’s hottest nightlife districts. Mark Paul reports.

AIB entered into a binding agreement on Wednesday to buy Ulster Bank’s portfolio of performing tracker mortgages at an almost 5 per cent discount to the expected €5.7 billion size of the portfolio by the time the deal is completed. Joe Brennan reports.

Surveilling every person in a building is a hugely disproportionate preventative measure when other less invasive security approaches are available. Karlin Lillington takes on facial recognition technology.

Last week payments firm PayPal announced a second round of job losses at its operations in Dundalk and Blanchardstown. From a high of about 2,800 a year ago, this will bring its employment down to about 2,000. However, PayPal is not the only technology company to announce a reduction of its cost base. Chris Horn rings the alarm bells.

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In an anonymous industrial park in the Netherlands, Apple is busy. Hundreds of old iPhones are working their way through an industrial production line for recycling, up to 200 per hour. The facility in Breda is home to Daisy, one of Apple’s state-of-the-art recycling robots that can break your old phone apart into different components for recycling, reducing the need to mine new materials. Ciara O’Brien reports.

The Owlet Smart Sock Plus is a baby monitor with a difference. It doesn’t use video or audio, although you can add a compatible Owlet camera if you want. Instead it concentrates on two things: heart rate and oxygen levels. Ciara O’Brien gives it a whirl.

Darach Ó Comhraí, Justin Perry and Kris Vansteenkiste are the co-founders of Frequency, a software collaboration and communications platform designed to bring the aviation industry into the digital age. Olive Keogh reports.

Cantillon says it’s an insult to retail to call Dublin Airport a “glorified” department store and that pressure looks set to build on Irish employers over pay.

Tourism and air travel have rebounded strongly in 2022 after two years of pandemic restrictions. But both are also facing major issues around pricing, staff and availability of product. In this episode of the Inside Business podcast, hotelier Lorraine Sweeney and Irish Times Business Affairs Correspondent Mark Paul outline some of the problems faced by the hospitality sector. Presenter Ciarán Hancock is also joined by aviation expert Joe Gill of Goodbody, to discuss how airlines across Europe are faring and whether the queuing at Dublin Airport will have a lasting impact on Ireland’s reputation as a tourism destination.

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