Housing cash unspent, costs of climate change and Paddy Cosgrave’s ongoing woes

Government spending on housing is significantly behind target again this year with State-backed agencies such as the Land Development Agency (LDA) said to be spending only a fraction of their budgetary allocations. Under its Housing for All strategy, the Government earmarked €4 billion for spending on social and affordable housing this year. Eoin Burke-Kennedy has the details.

Irish households, businesses and the Government face spending a total of more than €150 billion by the end of the decade on efforts to meet interim climate-action targets, according to Davy. Joe Brennan reports.

The resignation last week of Web Summit chief executive Paddy Cosgrave somehow managed to be both startling and utterly predictable at the same time, not unlike Cosgrave himself, writes Karlin Lillington in her weekly column. He’s always been an energetic creative dynamo with a contrarian bent. Credit where credit is due: a restless thinker and instigator, he managed to turn a modest idea – staging a few occasional talks in Dublin by some interesting Silicon Valley tech industry insiders – into the global success of the mammoth annual Web Summit and its spin-offs, an extraordinary achievement.

Cereals have been the mainstay of the human diet for thousands of years: even today over 50 per cent of the world’s daily calorie intake is cereal grain in some form. Yet only 20 per cent of main global cereal crops reach their full growth potential, with yields lost for a variety of reasons such as heat, cold, drought, disease and oxidative stress, writes Olive Keogh. Endeavouring to tackle this problem is SuperFifty Prime, an all new seaweed-based additive from Co Kerry company BioAtlantis which helps crops withstand the stresses associated with climate change.

Vulnerable people stuck in the middle of impasse over enduring power of attorney

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Sewage crisis: why this UK election is being fought on – and in – rivers and lakes

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Hubristic Woodford was the orchestrator of his own downfall

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Despite what people may think, taxes in Ireland are low compared to Europe

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Google’s new Pixel phone has the iPhone firmly in its sights. The latest smartphone from the tech giant has improved the camera and the display, tweaked the design and added new artificial intelligence tools to try to win over customers to the Android flagship. But will it be enough to sway users to upgrade from the earlier models, or even a rival Android phone brand? In short: maybe, writes Ciara O’Brien, who took it for a spin.

Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first US patent for software, died earlier this month at his Massachusetts home. He was 93. Richard Sandomir assesses his legacy.

Could a Supreme Court decision have huge implications for workers in the gig economy?

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It is now more than 18 years since the late Malcolm Glazer and his family completed their much-protested takeover of Manchester United. Having confirmed last November that they were open to offers, the Glazer family’s sale of the club seems to be dragging on almost as long, opines resident sage Cantillon.

How is blockchain changing financial services, asks Stephen Gandel, as after almost a decade, the secure-transaction technology has yet to make significant inroads into the traditional banking sector.

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