Irish Rail has fired the Spanish IT multinational Indra Sistemas, which had been developing the much-delayed system to manage the movement of trains across the network, reports Martin Wall. It is now preparing a legal case for damages.
As Irish Life looks to a future where people will routinely live until they are 100, Oisín O’Shoughnessy says, “The sums don’t add up in terms of people’s expectations” on their standard of living.
And the insurers’s head of public policy Teresa Kelly Oroz says there has been no “honest public policy or Government discussion around pensions adequacy and how much you do need to be saving to retirement, and how long you need to be working to be able to sustain that into retirement”.
Pilita Clark is taken aback by the preposterously arrogant comments of a chief executive in a media interview, but it does make her wonder why the outspoken chief executive – people like Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary – seems to have become an endangered breed.
While most Irish politicians accept that global heating is happening and is serious, they are more hesitant about the need to take action to halt it, writes John FitzGerald. Faced with other policy challenges, the political commitment to implementing an effective strategy is wavering.
But, he warns, any pause in the planned upward trajectory for the carbon tax in the budget would not only blunt the incentive to reduce fossil fuel use, but it would also mean less funds available to tackle fuel poverty among low-income households, hard hit by higher energy prices.
Minister for Finance Simon Harris last week announced details of the long-awaited personal investment plans, most of it for the umpteenth time. But, writes Michael Healy of IG Consumer, he has left out the only two numbers that matter.
Chef and food writer Catherine Fulvio talks money habits to Tony Clayton-Lea. Unsurprisingly, she says her kitchen has been probably her most extravagant purchase, “but it’s absolutely beautiful. It has everything that I need, and as I spend a good deal of my day there, I think it is extraordinarily good value for money”.
Few trademarks are as internationally recognisable as a symbol of quality as Ferrari but, writes Bryce Elder, sticking the prancing horse on things other than cars never seems to click.
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