State set to devote extra funds to big projects, but where is the money coming from?
budget
and where is the money going to come from?
We should get some clue from the second major document, the Summer Economic Statement (SES), which looks at the outlook for the budget.
Here, the key question is whether extra spending has left less room for day-to-day supports and tax reductions to be factored into the budget.
The SES will give some indication of room for manoeuvre in the budget – in other words, what the package on the day will cost. The budget ministers,
Paschal Donohoe
and
Jack Chambers
, are likely to indicate that less money is available this year.
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David McWilliams on how 'big incentives' to build could save Dublin city
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They are also likely to repeat the assertion that there is no
cost-of-living
package this year. How both of these commitments survive the run-up to the actual budget remains to be seen.
A key issue to watch for concerns budget overruns and whether the Government is going to take action to stop them happening this year.
The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, the budget watchdog, has said that the spending allocations for this year were flawed from day one, because they failed to build in overruns in 2024. With the council estimating overruns of €2 billion-plus this year, does the Cabinet plan to rein these in? And what does it mean for 2026?
The goal of keeping spending growth to 5 per cent a year, set in 2021, was quickly consigned to the dustbin. So, what will now replace it? Or is it just a case of spending whatever cash is available every year?
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Irish Times
7 minutes ago
- Irish Times
The Colonialist: Gruelling but impressive portrait of the virulent racist who bankrolled Parnell
The Colonialist: The Vision of Cecil Rhodes Author : William Kelleher Storey ISBN-13 : 978-0199811359 Publisher : Oxford University Press Guideline Price : £30.99 Cecil Rhodes never got around to visiting Ireland . The Englishman, whose name has become a byword for British imperialism, however, was also an enthusiastic supporter of Irish Home Rule. In 1888 the Africa-based mining magnate met Charles Stewart Parnell , was greatly impressed and sent him a donation of £10,000 (worth almost €1 million today). The money came with just one condition – Parnell had to alter his Home Rule policy so that some Irish MPs would remain at Westminster even after a parliament was established in Dublin. As William Kelleher Storey points out in this sober, heavyweight and quietly damning biography, Rhodes's generosity towards Ireland was not so surprising as it might first appear. Along with painting the world map red, he dreamed of creating a giant federal parliament in London with representation from every British colony. Ireland should be 'a stalking horse', he wrote to Parnell, and 'the stepping-stone to that federation, which is the condition of the continued existence of our empire'. Explaining this vision is a key theme of Storey's book, the first womb-to-tomb Rhodes biography for almost 40 years. During that time its subject has been increasingly denounced as a greedy plunderer, a white supremacist and an architect of South African apartheid. The international Rhodes Must Fall movement is still campaigning to topple statues of him at university campuses he once helped fund. While The Colonialist is anything but a whitewash, it does not shy away from an inconvenient truth. In Rhodes's own twisted way, he was also an idealist – and Storey argues vigorously that his record must be contextualised as well as condemned. If Rhodes was your specialist subject on Mastermind, this book would supply the answer to every conceivable question. In painstakingly researched detail, it recounts how the sickly son of a Hertfordshire vicar was sent out to his brother's Natalian cotton farm, built the De Beers diamond company into a massively profitable monopoly and wound up as prime minister of the Cape Colony. It chronicles his lifelong quest to unite southern Africa's four colonies into one self-governing state, spreading white settlements while exploiting the region's natural resources. A history professor at Millsaps College in Mississippi, Storey has a keen eye for anecdotes that illustrate Rhodes's distinctly odd personality. Young Cecil's nanny sometimes found the boy hidden away and moaning pitifully, unable to tell her why. Even after becoming fantastically wealthy, he valued power over possessions and usually dressed in rough workingman's clothes. He seems to have had a self-destructive streak, regularly consuming large amounts of rich food, cigars and alcohol, including a champagne and Guinness cocktail at lunchtime. 'I hear you are a woman hater,' Queen Victoria remarked to him over dinner, presumably because he never showed any interest in them. He gallantly replied: 'How could I dislike a sex to which your majesty belongs?' While Rhodes was not without charm or charisma, Storey accuses him of being far more devious than his upright image suggested. In one notorious episode, he effectively tricked the illiterate King Lobengula into signing a document that gave away gold mining rights across Matabeleland and other territories. When talking failed, Rhodes turned to guns and sanctioned a raid on the Transvaal's Boer republic that he hoped would spark a British uprising in 1895. Its failure permanently dented his reputation and he died just over six years later, aged 48. Above all, Storey leaves readers in no doubt that Rhodes was a virulent racist even by 19th-century standards. 'The natives are children … just emerging from barbarism,' he declared in a parliamentary speech described by the author as 'dripping with dismissive contempt'. He systematically deprived black people of land, finance and voting rights, telling a police officer during a rebellion: 'You should kill all you can … it serves a lesson to them when they talk things over their fires at night.' Rhodes has already inspired more than two dozen biographies, but Storey claims to go further than any of them by exploring his impact on southern Africa's physical landscape. There are many self-contained sections about how he changed its agriculture, railways, telecommunications, urban development and diamond production. Some of this is not for the squeamish, particularly an account of the grisly methods used by mine bosses to make sure workers were not smuggling precious stones in their bodies. It all adds up to a rich and panoramic narrative, so wide-ranging that The Life and Times of Cecil Rhodes might have been a better title. Charles Stewart Parnell predicted that the man who was bankrolling his party 'would not live in history'. On this, at least, the 'uncrowned king of Ireland' was dead wrong. 'It will be much easier to remove a few statues than to reverse the legacy of Cecil Rhodes,' Storey warns at the conclusion of his often gruelling but always impressive portrait. 'Understanding what he did is a first step to freedom.'
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
Irish Examiner view: This may be the dawn of the clean energy era
Even five years ago, we might have looked at the head of the UN saying 'the sun is rising on a clean energy age' with the shining hope it deserved. It wasn't blind hyperbole last week. Some 90% of renewable energy projects are now cheaper than their fossil-fuel equivalents. A surge in solar adoption has been important, and the huge focus on low-carbon manufacturing from China has played a significant role. This should probably be seen as dovetailing with the country's policies around control of the materials vital for green energy. And yet, in the face of the continuing rise in global temperatures, the struggle to encourage accelerated adoption of EVs (bearing in mind the vast number of petrol and diesel vehicles still on the roads), and a US administration that is turning the clock back on renewable energy, one might almost see António Guterres's statement as a pyrrhic victory. Still, we could look at this in five years and comment on a remarkable turnaround. Guterres is right to point out that a great deal of energy insecurity revolves around fossil fuels, and so they are susceptible to the price shocks that accompany wars, invasions, and other geopolitical events. He said: 'There are no price spikes for sunlight,' he said. 'No embargoes for wind.' Let us look on his speech last week with the positivity it deserves. When it comes to hope, like the Irish phrase says: 'Níl sé marbh fós.' It isn't dead yet, even if it is a faded shade of what it once was. Real battles are for resources History might, to adapt Jacob Field, seem like one bloody thing after another, but it seems to have been an endless resource grab. For example, the ceaseless scramble for raw materials led to the carving up of Africa by European imperial powers in the 19th century and the same of the Americas from the 15th century on. Water is likely to be a future issue, but right now the flashpoints centre around things like rare earths (vital for semiconductors) and minerals that are essential for modern technology and green energy. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), subjected to what we would now class as crimes against humanity by Belgian interests in the 19th century, is as important to minerals as Saudia Arabia has been to oil. The EU has been working to secure contracts there. America, however, has been improving its position, attempting to capitalise on ongoing violence sponsored by DRC's neighbouring countries such as Rwanda. This as Donald Trump still harbours ambitions of annexing the mineral-rich Canada and Greenland, as well as securing a treaty with Ukraine that allows for US exploitation of its mineral wealth. All that, though, still leaves every country trailing well behind China. China, having spent the last few years greatly expanding its influence through its belt and road initiative, has extensive footholds in Africa now, between mining contracts and loans to fund infrastructure. It has mining operations around the world, and some 60%-80% of minerals — including cobalt (batteries) and uranium — are within its orbit. This has been seen as a security threat by some Western powers, and the thought is not without merit (even if some Western countries would do the same if they could). What if China simply cut off Western access to the minerals under its control? Or hiked all the prices? How long would existing supplies for advanced and everyday technology last? China has typically taken the long — some would say very long — view when it comes to economics. It may well be the manufacturing hub of the world, but that doesn't mean it couldn't simply outwait the countries that have outsourced their manufacturing industries to its cities. We live in a globalised world, despite the best efforts of some, and the phone in your hand or pocket with the cobalt in its battery serves as a reminder of just how delicate it is and how interconnected we all are. What's your view on this issue? You can tell us here Making dreams come true When it comes to connections, despite our own travails at home, it is good that we, as a country, still remember that there are those with greater needs than our own. As reported by Imasha Costa in today's edition, there are now six children's homes in Sri Lanka that have been funded by Irish people. All are named after the towns that support them. Initially founded by Wicklow-Wexford TD Brian Brennan, these began in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami that devastated swathes of Asia. They have since grown in number. While Sri Lanka itself has its dangers — Costa notes in a first-person piece that emigration is common, extreme poverty is endemic, and she herself was injured in an attempted robbery there in 2023 — it is something of a balm to know that there are oases of calm for children. The country faces significant economic and political challenges, yet some of the boys and girls who have spent time at the homes have gone on to bigger and better things. They are described as 'exceptionally talented … they have incredibly massive dreams'. Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí. Read More Letters to the Editor: Blurred line between right and wrong
Irish Examiner
3 hours ago
- Irish Examiner
From boycotts to barcodes: How supermarket choices still shape the world
Collective action in the supermarket can influence world events. Dunnes Stores workers boycotted South African oranges in the 1970s. The strike made international headlines and led the Irish government to ban fruit and vegetables from South Africa. Prior to the strike the workers had known little about South Africa, but were persuaded by Nimrod Sejake, a trade unionist from South Africa exiled in Ireland, that South Africa was like a pint of Guinness: A small number of whites at the top and all the black people underneath. People can now take collective action by using apps. Scan a barcode and the app may tell you whether the product you want to buy has been ethically produced. I was recently made aware of a missed scan or misinformation on one of these boycott apps. That gave rise to a question about the country of origin of a citrus fruit and the information contained on the label. It's remarkable how much information can be derived from a small tag or label attached to a net of oranges, and I'm going to use oranges as an example. The shopper had scanned the label on a net of oranges in to an app, which read the label and reported that it was an unrelated product, a bar of chocolate. Because the bar code didn't match the product that had been scanned, the shopper felt there was something nefarious about the oranges, which were labelled as Egyptian. There are two questions: Do the boycott apps work, and can we rely upon the labels in the supermarket? Boycott apps scan a product's bar code and identify the brand, manufacturer, or parent company. Based on this, they tell you whether the product aligns with or violates ethical, political, or environmental criteria. Most of these apps do not have access to a full bar code registry, so they rely on crowdsourcing databases, open-product databases, and public company information. Larger organisations and companies are easier to track than others, particularly when the bar codes are common internationally. For example, a can of popular cola has the same bar code no matter the country. Products that are produced and manufactured specifically for a supermarket are more difficult to track. Some retailers use brand-specific bar codes that only work in their own shop environments and do not transfer elsewhere. I visited five supermarkets belonging to the pillar retail brands in Ireland and examined each individual bar code on citrus fruit. That shopper was right: One specific net of oranges scans as a bar of chocolate from a competitor. However, of all the citrus fruit labels that I examined more than 50% are not contained within the boycott app that the consumer used. Remember, the apps rely on shoppers to upload this data to inform others. What about those labels that say that the product has come from Egypt? I visited many Irish supermarkets and examined more labels on oranges, lemons, and limes than I care to count, and one thing became apparent: All citruses sold in Ireland are clearly labelled with the country of origin. It's actually unsurprising that some of the oranges on our shelves come from Egypt, the fifth-largest producer of citrus fruit in the world and the largest in proximity to Europe — it produces more than Spain. Under EU regulations (No 1169/2011) the country of origin must be placed clearly on the product label. All the labels I examined stated where these citrus fruits had originated, whether it was Egypt or Spain, or beyond Europe and her neighbours, or as far afield as Argentina and Costa Rica. Also, did you know that any treatments applied to your fruit before it makes it to the supermarket shelves are now clearly disclosed on the labels? If you have looked closely at the labels on fruit lately you may have noticed some terms that may not be familiar to you. Thiabendazole, Pyrimethanil, and Imazalil are all fungicides and applied as a dip or a spray after harvest to reduce the growth of mould. You'd be familiar with this mould if you picked up an orange that may have sat in the fruit basket for too long and saw it had developed a green or blue mould and was exceedingly squishy. These fungicides are designed to keep your fruit fresher for longer and are highly regulated by the EU. The final treatment that you may see listed on the label is E904 — commonly known as shellac. Shellac is often used to glaze apples and citrus fruits to give them a shiny appearance and can extend shelf life. Any fruits that have been treated with this glaze are unsuitable for vegans, as shellac is a natural resin secreted by the lac insect. Vegan or not, we should all be washing our fruits before eating or even juicing them. BOYCOTT APPS Boycat and 'No Thanks' [ are the names of two ethical trading apps which many Irish consumers are using to check food producers to see if they are on a boycott list. An organisation may be placed onto a boycott list for being based in a particular country, but also having dubious equality or sustainability credentials. These apps enable consumers to make an informed choice when doing the shopping. Always read the label — and approach the retailer if you have any queries on provenance. If you believe that a retailer or trader has breached consumer law, you can always report your concerns to the CCPC by phoning their National Consumer Helpline on 01 402 5555 or emailing ask@ Read More Remember when a minister held Guinness 'hostage'? And other Irish food stories
