Compiled by LAURA SLATTERY

The list: Spanish companies in Ireland

Minister for Finance Michael Noonan may have felt able to assert that feta cheese is the only Greek product consumed in Ireland, but he may find it harder to dismiss the Spanish that way. Here are five Spanish-founded enterprises with an interest in Ireland:

1. Inditex: Its rising share price has seen the Zara-owner – the world's largest clothing retailer – overtake Telefonica to become the biggest company in Spain.

2. Telefonica: The O2 owners fortunes have slipped of late, with one analyst telling Bloomberg its "performance is so weak that it makes me laugh".

3. Iberdrola: The utility firm, the world's leader in renewable energy, invested $55 million in Irish oil and gas explorer Petroceltic in 2008.

4. Ferrovial: In the last decade, the infrastructure giant won multiple construction contracts for roads in Northern Ireland and the Republic.

5. Repsol: The oil group has a 25 per cent interest in Providence Resources' offshore Dunquin licence – an exploration project based 200km off the southwest coast.

The lexicon: Plussification

Plussification is the verbification (sorry) of the use of the social network Google+. While they may know in their hearts that Google+ is unlikely to take off in quite the way that Google wants, marketers are also aware that sharing content on the network will promote their wares further up Google’s search engine rankings. “Plussification” is, in its own roundabout way, as good a reason as any to spend time and effort on Google+, unless of course the network’s live video chat “hangouts” manage to reach some kind of tipping point in the near future.

Image of the week: Trolleys and trash

These are the purposefully and rather artfully cluttered floors of Barcelona airport, where cleaning staff working for AENA, the company holding the contract with the Barcelona El Prat Airport, have staged a demonstration against a cut in pay and benefits by throwing pieces of paper over the departures floor and the trolley-laden travelators. As cleaners’ protests go, it’s pretty mild, really, when you think about the possibilities. And as far as civil unrest in Spain is concerned, the airport paper protest seems set to be the first of many creative outpourings of anger in an employment wasteland where the government is fast running out of ideas as to how it might fix its finances. Photograph: Getty Images

Getting to know . . . Thorsten Heins

As chief executive of Blackberry-maker Research in Motion, Thorsten Heins hasn’t had a particularly great week, all told. On Wednesday, the company warned that it will have to make significant job cuts, that it’s on track to make a loss in its most recent quarter and that it was bringing in blue-chip advisers to help with a “strategic review”. RIM’s handset business has lost ground deemed unrecoverable to iPhones and Android phones – or as Heins put it, “the ongoing competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes”. Heins was elevated to chief executive in January, when RIM was already struggling. So far his efforts to turn the company around have met with little success, and he has still not set a date to launch the much delayed new generation of Blackberry 10 smartphones.

In numbers: Euro trouble

6.7

– The yield on Spanish 10-year governments bonds reached on Wednesday as markets fretted about the size of the country’s deficit. A rate above 7 per cent is considered unsustainable “bailout time” territory.

8

– Number of countries told this week they were not ready to join the euro, despite the fact that 7 of them had a debt-to-GDP ratio below the euro zone limit of 60 per cent, suggesting it is the euro that is not ready for them.

€22.6 bn

– outflow in foreign portfolio investment from Spain in March – more than 10 times the size of the outflow in the same month a year earlier, according to the Bank of Spain.

€3trillion

– the sum wiped from the value of world stock markets in May was in excess of this figure.