Irish shares held on to most of their gains in the afternoon session despite the weaker opening on Wall Street, where the Dow had fallen 40 points by the time the Irish market closed. The local market was helped by support for the leaders and a belief that the interim reporting season - which really gets under way next week with results from Kerry, Smurfit, CRH and Waterford Wedgwood - will show strong growth in corporate earnings.
Excellent results from Grafton and Readymix augur well for CRH results next week, and CRH dealt up 8p to 723p. Readymix and Grafton did not trade from their overnight levels but both stocks are well-supported at 1100p and 180p respectively.
Elsewhere among the leaders, there was solid support for the two main banks with AIB up 6p to 574p and Bank of Ireland 7p higher on 775p.
Smurfit added 2p to 222p despite JS Corp falling back to $19 on Wall Street.
Greencore was 2p higher on 322p as the market digested the implications for Greencore of Imperial Holly's $491 million (£332.8 million) bid for Savannah Foods. If the deal does goes ahead and Greencore is diluted down to 16 per cent of Imperial, it may mean that Greencore will use much of its strong cash flow to fund further equity investments in Imperial. In that case, a share buyback by Greencore, the subject of speculation for some time now, would probably be ruled out. Ryanair continued its strong recovery and gained 28p to 353p as CSFB went bullish on the stock and blamed the recent fall in the share price on the badly managed conference call on the first-quarter results and the activities of one big "sloppy seller". CSFB has put a 425p target price on the Ryanair shares.
