Posts by Laura

Subscribers to the Financial Times may have read the article published in that newspaper earlier this week, analysing Ireland’s plan to redress the urban-rural divide through the newly-unveiled remote working plan (you can read the article in full here). It is critically important for State initiatives such as this to be well received outside of Ireland, as our…

Irish Independent columnist Paul McNeive published an interesting interview with Michael McAteer, managing partner at corporate recovery and insolvency specialists Grant Thornton Ireland, this week. The interview focused on the post-pandemic recovery and speculated about what this might look like. The Grant Thornton chief forecasts a “two-tier recovery” for the country. When asked what advice he has…

Most years, the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations serve to break up a busy quarter and mark the progression of the year. It might be difficult for people to feel that way this year, it has been a long ‘winter’ for the market. Earlier this week, Tanaiste Leo Varadkar said that retail and other personal services…

Earlier this week the latest Dublin Economic Monitor (DEM) was published, in partnership with the four Dublin local authorities. It adds much-needed statistics to ongoing commentary about the impact of Covid-19 on local businesses and the prospect of recovery in 2021. Unemployment levels across Dublin fell below 692,000 towards the end of last year, however,…

The latest CBRE Market Outlook report issued this week and it is fair to say, on the whole, is it broadly more positive than the Mitchell McDermott report referenced here last week. There is some great information on the current Dublin office marketplace, with insights on trends around occupier behaviours and priorities when guiding their…

It is unlikely to surprise many people in the industry that the number of proposed new housing units delayed by judicial reviews has increased over the past two years. This is something we have mentioned here, in frustration, on a number occasions, usually in the context of poor local planning or outright NIMBY-ism (‘not in…

With news emerging this week that suggests the reopening of non-essential construction activities might be pushed out by a further month, to early April, it was good to read that Dublin is now the most popular destination for financial services firms moving business out of London. While this is not altogether unexpected or surprising, it…

“There’s no such thing as a sure thing…”. That is generally pretty good advice, but one true lesson from every crisis and economic or market meltdown is that not everyone loses. From every fluctuation, there emerges both winners and losers. It is already becoming clear that Covid-19 and the utter disruption it has caused to…

This is a big question. Perhaps the better question is around the perceived democracy of our current planning regime. How democractic do people in Ireland think or believe the planning system to be? And the answer appears to depend upon where you live, whether or not you own your own home, what level of wealth…