The Trump tariffs are inevitably the main focus this morning. The 20 per cent tariff imposed with a flourish of a bookies’ odds board on all EU states was very much in line with what had been expected, Cliff Taylor writes, but that didn’t soften the blow for businesses exporting from Ireland. The ball is now in the European Union’s court but Brussels may well exercise caution to see if US consumers and companies put a squeeze on the Administration in Washington DC as the higher costs of goods hits their pockets.
Passengers using Dublin Airport won’t have to fret over the 32 million a year passenger cap for some time after the High Court confirmed it will remains suspended until a case taken by airlines against the Irish Aviation Authority is decided. And as issues have been referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union, that could be some time yet. Barry O’Halloran reports.
Barry also reports on the move by Belgian group D’leteren, owner of the upmarket notebook maker, Moleskine, to buy a leading Irish car parts distributor.
Fresh from his electoral humiliation yesterday in Wisconsin, Elon Musk was in the news again as data showed Tesla’s deliveries tumbled in the first three months of this year, marking its worst quarter since 2022. US President Donald Trump also reportedly told his inner circle that Musk will soon leave the administration.
Elsewhere, Digicel, the group formerly owned by Denis O’Brien, has told bondholders that a planned refinancing of a chunk of its debt has been deferred due to continuing uncertainly over the status of a US investigation into the company. Joe Brennan has the details.
And a Dublin court heard how an Irish payroll manager received thousands of euro in monthly payments to pass information from his own firm to a rival company, and then was instructed by lawyers for the rival to provide false statements to the Central Bank of Ireland and the High Court when the alleged “spying” arrangement came to light.
Hugh Dooley reports on CoStar data showing that Ireland is the only country in Europe which had a higher rate of hotel occupancy in the last 12-months than before the Covid-19 pandemic.
A high-level advisory group has told Government that Ireland should introduce laws in line with those brought in following the actors’ strike in Hollywood to protect the rights of performers and public figures in an era of advancing AI technologies. Mark Hilliard reports.
In her column, Ciara O’Brien shows how simple mistakes online can lead to your very personal date being hacked.
The New York Times’s Ben Casselman looks into the long-term damage that Trump’s defunding of basic scientific research might do to the wider US economy.
We also look at the rise of the LinkedIn superuser and what drives them, while Ciara O’Brien’s tech review wrestles with the more prosaic issue of whether a Nintendo-designed alarm clock really make early morning wake-up calls fun.
Finally, after a week when CSO data showed a decline of 30 per cent in the number of visitors to the country in February – and tourism revenue taking an €88 million hit – Eoghan O’Mara Walsh, CEO of the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation, tells Inside Business host Ciarán Hancock why he thinks the CSO figures might be overstating the travails of the sector.
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