Ireland’s trillion-euro trade industry is uniquely exposed to a “big risk” of becoming caught in the crossfire of escalating geopolitical tensions, according to a landmark government report seen by the Sunday Businesss Post.
A series of stark warnings about the far-reaching implications of increasing geopolitical fragmentation, and calls for a big government response to protect industry here are also laid out in a new report.
The report – written by an expert group including a top executive at Johnson & Johnson, enterprise officials, and IDA Ireland – comes amid growing fears over the threats posed to Ireland by the election of Donald Trump as US president.
The group have urged the government to co-ordinate a “shock diagnosis” on certain strategic sectors in Ireland to assess the impact of disruption to value chains.
“The overall objective is to ‘war game’ how a given scenario might play out and how the policy system would need to react to issues such as impacts on demand, supply, logistics, information gaps, supports to companies etc,” the group wrote.
Aer Lingus workers being asked to take unpaid leave
Aer Lingus is to restructure its ground operations departments at Dublin Airport and is asking staff to take unpaid leave in the new year, the Sunday Independent reports
The plan, which is to be implemented in January, “will mean changes in most areas” including its check-in, boarding, arrivals and baggage-tracing departments, according to an airline document seen by the paper.
Fine Gael courts business owners with USC cut
Simon Harris announced plans to support self-employed people by axeing the Universal Social Charge (USC) surcharge, as well as increasing tax credits for those who build up their business in Ireland.
The Fine Gael leader on Sunday published details of his party’s manifesto, which the Sunday Business Post reported had a three-point package for businesses.
The document said that cash flow for SMEs in Ireland can be enhanced through a targeted approach by not placing undue penalties on the self-employed.
Megaport opens up Latin America to Chinese trade
As the world waits to see how the return of Donald Trump will reshape relations between Washington and Beijing, China has just taken decisive action to entrench its position in Latin America, the BBC reports.
Trump won the US presidential election on a platform that promised tariffs as high as 60 per cent on Chinese-made goods. Further south, though, a new China-backed megaport has the potential to create whole new trade routes that will bypass North America entirely.
President Xi Jinping himself attended the inauguration of the Chancay port on the Peruvian coast this week, an indication of just how seriously China takes the development.
Xi was in Peru for the annual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Forum (Apec). But all eyes were on Chancay and what it says about China’s growing assertiveness in a region that the US has traditionally seen as its sphere of influence.
‘We can’t build’ says developer
Chronic neglect of Ireland’s water and electricity infrastructure has led one of the country’s most ambitious housebuilders to warn: “We can’t build.”
The intervention from Ronan Columb, managing director of Castlethorn, comes as the three main parties fight the general election on their ability to solve the housing crisis, says the Sunday Business Post
Castlethorn has plans to build 20,000 homes over the next decade but the firm, founded and led by Dundrum Town Centre-builder Joe O’Reilly, is running into repeated problems due to failures by Irish Water and ESB.
“There isn’t a site that we have where there isn’t either an electricity problem or a water problem, and that’s mainly down to just chronic underinvestment in those utilities over many years,” Columb told the paper.
He added that the infrastructure on the eastern seaboard “isn’t robust enough to take additional units”.
“We can’t build. We have a site in Drogheda for 1,400 units and we’re several hundred units into that, but we know we’re coming to a point with Irish Water, for example, where there’s a capacity constraint. Eventually we’ll have to stop and wait for Irish Water to deliver on infrastructure,” Columb said.
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