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👋 Céad míle fáilte! If a bishop could build Knock Airport, sure what's stopping Michael?
Ireland's most quotable airline boss, Michael O'Leary, has lodged plans with Westmeath Council for a regional airport on the outskirts of his hometown. The proposal is for a single-runway facility is aimed at easing pressure on Dublin Airport. Low-cost operations. Central location. Classic O'Leary. (We half-expected the planning application to include a €2 fee to use the departures gate.)
And while one Irish airline was busy lodging planning applications, the other was busy lodging itself in everyone's feeds. Aer Lingus dropped a tricolour sunburn that had the internet talking, with one commenter summing it up perfectly: "I suppose some of us appreciate quality thought-out content from our Irish airlines (and not just the latest lazy wisecrack about being budget…)" No comment.
This week in irish insights:
✈️ Abroad: Irish unicorn alert, Tipperary man signs deal to test robots in space, Eolas launch and Ireland's big month in the US.
🏠 At home: Manna raises $50m, WHOOP brings 90 jobs and Jamie Farrell launches BinCompare.ie.
💡Insights: Barry O'Reilly on why more intelligence is making your decisions harder, not easier.
🧠 Brain food: Irish founders pioneering the next web, a Kerry man who invented the word entrepreneur, and Ireland's EV tipping point.
Enjoy ☕
LATEST UPDATES
News from abroad ✈️
🇦🇺 No Hallucinations, Just Results: Irish-founded ExeQution Analytics has launched Eolas, an AI trading assistant built to eliminate hallucinated data, one of the nastier failure modes in applying AI to financial markets. The name is Irish for "knowledge," which is either poetic or on the nose depending on your tolerance for branding. Either way, the problem they're solving is real: traders acting on fabricated AI outputs is not a theoretical risk. Getting this right in a regulated, high-stakes environment is genuinely hard. Worth watching.
🇺🇸 Ireland's Big Month on the West Coast: The IDA's West Coast team had a March to remember. Minister Martin Heydon led senior engagements across the US, including a visit to Boeing's 737 MAX facility, fitting given Ryanair is Boeing's largest single 737 MAX customer. The month also featured the Irish Tech Summit at the Computer History Museum, AIB opening its new San Francisco office, and a cyber security fireside chat with the director of Ireland's NCSC. The breadth of it, spanning manufacturing, life sciences, fintech and cyber, is a useful reminder that Ireland's US pitch is more than just tax rates and tech campuses.
🇺🇸 Tipperary Man Sending Robots to Space: Jamie Palmer is 25, from Tipperary, and his New York-based company Icarus Robotics has signed a deal with Voyager Technologies to test its free-flying robotic platform aboard the International Space Station in early 2027. The robots use AI to perform tasks autonomously in orbit. The commercial space economy is moving fast and the companies getting real hardware onto the ISS right now are the ones building the track record that matters when bigger contracts come around. One to follow.
🇬🇧 Irish co-founded 9fin Hits Unicorn Status: 9fin, the debt capital markets analytics platform co-founded by Belfast native Steven Hunter and Hussam El-Sheikh, has raised $170 million at a $1.3 billion valuation, backed by HarbourVest Partners and Highland Europe's Fergal Mullen. Debt capital markets is unglamorous territory compared to consumer tech but it's enormous, data-hungry, and historically underserved by modern tooling. A billion dollar outcome in that space is a serious signal that the picks-and-shovels approach to fintech still has plenty of runway.
At home 🏠
Drone delivery company Manna has secured a $50 million Series B, totaling $110 million in funding. While many drone delivery ventures have failed, Manna has successfully scaled operations in Irish towns.
Health tracker WHOOP has confirmed 90 new jobs at its Irish operation alongside a $575 million fundraise. The company counts Shane Lowry, Rory McIlroy and Niall Horan among its Irish investors.
Mitsubishi Electric will acquire Infinity Lifts, an elevator company based in Co. Clare. Not the flashiest deal but exactly the kind of acquisition that signals international confidence in Irish businesses outside the usual tech corridors.
Community Spot: Jamie Farrell has built a side project worth bookmarking. BinCompare.ie compares 388 bin collection plans across 47 companies nationwide. Select your county, see what you'd pay.
📰 Have a story that needs to be told? Drop us a note here.
💡 INSIGHTS
The Leadership Problem Nobody Is Talking About
Barry O'Reilly is a Irish Insights subscriber. We don't get paid to feature community members, we just think this one is worth your time.
Barry O'Reilly is a Technological University Dublin grad, bestselling author and entrepreneur who advises senior leaders at global organisations on how to redesign performance, decision-making and innovation at scale. Co-founder of Nobody Studios, faculty at Singularity University and contributor to The Economist, his previous books Lean Enterprise and Unlearn are required reading in leadership circles worldwide.
His latest, Artificial Organizations, opens with a scene most leaders will recognise. Midnight. Family asleep. Dinner untouched. Rewriting a business case that should have been done days ago.
His argument is simple but uncomfortable: we have more data, more tools and more intelligence than ever before, and our decisions are getting harder, not easier. The problem is not access to AI. It is judgment. And it starts at the top.
No transformation roadmaps. No tool lists. A practical judgment operating system you can start using this week.
Worth your time if you lead a team of any size.
👉 FULL STORY: Artifical Organizations by Barry O’Reilly
🧠 BRAIN FOOD
5 other things we are snacking on this week
Richard O'Shaughnessy’s video breaks down two huge drops this week from companies led by Irish founders, Stripe and Jentic. Their new tooling is quietly pioneering the next phase of the web.
Green Room co-founder and Partner Jack Cantillon just revealed that his ancestor Richard Cantillon, from Co. Kerry, coined the word "entrepreneur" in the early 1700s. One of the better things you'll read this week.
Fiona Kelly makes the case that Ireland's Angel Incentive Relief, introduced in 2023, is structurally broken and almost nobody is talking about it.
Charlie Taylor takes a stroll with Kota CEO Luke Mackey. Inside Kota: how the fast-growing Irish startup plans to take over a $100bn benefits market.
Irish car sales in March tell a story: electric up 52%, petrol down 38%, diesel down 37%. First time ever that electric has outsold both. The transition is not coming, it is here.
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