Julian Moreau feed

For most households, the mortgage is by far the biggest monthly outgoing — which makes it the place where a small change delivers the largest saving. Yet it is also the bill people are most reluctant to touch, partly out of the belief that switching is complicated, and partly because nothing forces the issue. The result is that a great many Irish homeowners sit for years on a rate well above what they could be paying, quietly handing their lender thousands of euro more than necessary. Here is how mortgage switching actually works in 2026, and how to tell whether it is worth it for you.

The figure that sits at the centre of this story is one the state does not particularly want to examine: in the year to April 2025, 35,000 Irish citizens emigrated from Ireland. In the same period, 31,500 returned. The Irish citizen population is, for the third consecutive year, a net exporter of its own people.

This is not a crisis in the acute sense. The numbers are not remotely approaching the famine emigration, or the 1950s emigration, or even the depths of the post-2008 emigration wave when the outflow of Irish citizens peaked at around 50,000 per year and every family in the country seemed to be putting someone on a plane to Sydney or Calgary. The government, when asked about the current figures, tends to observe that return migration is also strong, that the overall population continues to grow through net inward migration, and that Ireland's employment market remains among the most dynamic in Europe. None of this is false.

What it obscures is the specific character of who is leaving and why — and what that tells you about a state that has built one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU on the assumption that it does not need to make itself liveable for the people it produces.

A growing body of research is beginning to draw a clearer line between early exposure to gambling and long-term behavioral risk. A recent study conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute highlights a striking pattern: individuals who begin gambling before the age of 18 are significantly more likely to develop problematic habits later in life.

The findings suggest that early engagement is not a marginal factor, but one of the strongest predictors of gambling-related harm in adulthood. In practical terms, starting young nearly doubles the likelihood of developing a gambling problem, placing early exposure at the center of current policy discussions.

Affiliate Exposure refers to the combined regulatory, legal, and reputational risk borne by a licensed gambling operator as a result of actions taken by affiliated marketing partners, when those actions are deemed by regulators to form part of the operator’s commercial activity.

Across Europe, the language around tourism is changing. What was once framed almost exclusively as economic success is increasingly discussed in terms of pressure, imbalance, and loss of control. From Barcelona to Amsterdam to Paris, large European cities are grappling with the same question: how much tourism can an urban environment absorb before it begins to undermine itself?

From Ireland, the strike at the Louvre looks less like a uniquely French crisis and more like a warning signal for cultural institutions across Europe. When the world’s most visited museum — a cornerstone of European tourism and a symbol of French cultural power — is brought to a standstill by an unlimited strike, the issue clearly goes deeper than labour negotiations or short-term disruption.

For years, rising living costs have been framed as a temporary storm — inflation, energy shocks, global uncertainty. That explanation no longer holds. When prices outpace wages year after year, the problem is not external pressure. It is design.

When Catherine Connolly swept into office with a victory margin that stunned the entire political establishment, her supporters imagined a new era of honesty, independence and long-overdue moral clarity. Instead, the country is witnessing something entirely different: a presidency hurtling into crisis before it has even found its footing, driven by scandals she did not anticipate, silence she cannot justify, leaks she cannot control and a level of internal dysfunction that insiders describe as “a slow-motion implosion with no adults in the room”.