SSE and Bord na Móna to spend €1bn on wind farms

State-owned Bord na Móna and SSE Renewables plan to spend €1 billion on building onshore wind farms capable of supplying electricity to almost 500,000 homes. The pair said on Thursday that they planned to join forces on a green electricity project in one of the largest deals of its kind ever done in this country. Barry O’Halloran has the details.

House price inflation accelerated again in the first quarter on the back of what the State’s largest estate agent said was “a chronic lack of supply in the second-hand market”. Sherry FitzGerald said asking prices for second-hand homes nationally rose by 2 per cent between January and March and were up by 5.1 per cent on an annual basis. This compared to with annualised growth of 3.6 per cent this time last year. Eoin Burke-Kennedy reports

Corporate insolvencies rose 41 per cent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year and have more than doubled compared with the first three months of 2022, according to new figures from PwC Ireland. Some 223 businesses became insolvent in January-March this year, putting this number on track to come in close to 1,000 for 2024 as a whole, exceeding the 850 recorded in pre-pandemic 2019, PwC said. Laura Slattery reports.

At the risk of sounding like someone’s ageing, cranky mother, people these days don’t know that they are born. There was a time when all TV in Ireland was a handful of channels, and if you were lucky, you got extra channels via cable. The idea of pausing live TV to make a cuppa hadn’t even been dreamed of yet, and new episodes were a weekly event, rather than binge-watched seven years after the series finished. Ciara O’Brien looks at the options available via the internet.

PTSB most exposed Irish lender to competitive threat from Spanish move into market

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Stella Li of Chinese car maker BYD: ‘We don’t want to engage in a price war’

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Will consumers benefit from Aviva entering the Irish health insurance market?

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The world’s richest countries must invest in effective, cheap technologies to tackle climate change

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Looking more closely at Autonomy and Mike Lynch now, both chime in curiously familiar ways with our current times, writes Karlin Lillington. Lynch’s background before setting up Autonomy was in adaptive pattern recognition, an early stage of what we’d now call AI, and he’d already developed software for fingerprint, facial and auto licence recognition – use cases of ongoing controversy today.

Should Ireland impose a levy on subsea cable operators and data centres to help allay the costs of protection against sabotage, asks Chris Horn in his column. How would the Government respond if a private consortium of tech companies indicated that if the State is not prepared to protect their valuable undersea assets, then they will operate their own security capabilities in Irish waters?

In Profile: Barry Napier, Irish Times Business Person of the Year 2023

Listen | 47:29

Healthcare company Wellola has raised €2.2 million to expand its platform and accelerate its growth amid a growing demand for digital healthcare programmes in the United Kingdom and Ireland, reports Ciara O’Brien.

Specialist speech and language therapist Kate Beckett is the founder of Ultimate Speech Sounds, a soon-to-be launched app that helps correct speech sound disorders in children, writes Olive Keogh. Sound errors often occur when a child is acquiring their language skills and most mistakes will disappear as they get older. What the app is tackling, however, are the errors that persist after a child’s peers have stopped making similar mistakes.

Dyson has been working on its cleaners for years, starting with the launch of the Dyson 360 Eye in 2016 and followed by the Heurist 360 in 2020. The design was compact yet chunky, which meant the vacuum rarely fit under low furniture such as sofas, for example, although it did expertly navigate its way between chairs in the kitchen. Now we have the Dyson 360 Vis Nav, which Ciara O’Brien takes for a spin.

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