Mopping up the messy entrails of 2024 isn’t a straightforward job. What kind of year was that anyway? For much of the business world, it felt like a wait-and-see period – a damp purgatory for some, a cushioned holding pattern of a year for others.
Plenty enjoyed a 2024 that was somewhere between reasonable and decent, if not the definitive bounce-back they had hoped for in January. Some started the year in positions of strength and went on to manifest more success than ever. Some, channelling corporation tax receipts, were worryingly buoyant.
But within industries wracked by inflation, cost-of-living pressures and/or retreating rates of investment, “survive ‘til 25″ became the quiet catchphrase. Some ran out of money, then ran out of time. Some just wilted. Others swam in a sea of setbacks, gasping through another quarter, another season.
Dispiritingly, those for whom the year could have been better included much of the hospitality industry. More than 600 restaurants, cafes and food businesses closed, according to the Restaurants Association of Ireland industry lobby group, as swollen costs and the legacy of pandemic debt overwhelmed them.
In August, there was shock among restaurateurs as celebrated chef Dylan McGrath shut down two restaurants, Brasserie Sixty6 and Rustic Stone, warning that hospitality in Dublin was “simply not sustainable”. Other big names joined in the retrenchment: October saw Shanahan’s on the Green close for the foreseeable, while Dillinger’s in Ranelagh said goodbye to customers after a 15-year “wild ride”.
For Press Up, the fast scaled-up group founded by schoolfriends Paddy McKillen jnr (son of the property developer) and Matt Ryan, there was something even more unpalatable on the menu: a reckoning.
In September, London-based lender Cheyne Capital took control of the group in a debt-for-equity swap that aims to solidify its financials. One Wowburger and three Wagamama restaurants in Dublin were shuttered and though it later opened Asian restaurant Kaldero in the former Wagamamas outlet on South King Street, it was still a glum autumn for a group that had previously seemed immune from the woes of the sector.
Not far away, a retailer at the heart of Dublin since the 1970s was counting the cost of changed fashions: Alias Tom, which in its time had clothed U2, Westlife and the business and political elite, went into liquidation, citing “the move toward less formal workwear”.
Founded in 1976 by Tom Kennedy, Alias Tom once had exclusivity on brands such as Prada, Hugo Boss and Gucci. But in 2024, the “only realistic option” left for the company – 10 per cent of which was still owned by Kennedy – was to wind up.
Dublin stockbrokers were part of the Alias Tom clientele at one point, but Dublin stockbrokers are now themselves a lesser spotted breed. As for the Irish Stock Exchange, which has traded as Euronext Dublin since 2018, this wasn’t a vintage year. In July, packaging group Smurfit Kappa, as it was then known, completed a hat-trick of heavyweight exits that started in 2023 with CRH and continued in January with Flutter Entertainment.
Mention of the 231-year-old exchange in the budget speech of the somewhat younger Minister for Finance, Jack Chambers, reflected the extent to which a halving of companies on the Iseq All-Share index since 2018 was perceived to have become an Ireland Inc problem, not merely a Euronext one.
It hasn’t helped that HealthBeacon and Corre Energy, two of the only three companies to take initial public offerings (IPOs) in Dublin over the past five years, have not had a tremendous time of it.
By January, cash-burning medical technology company HealthBeacon had progressed from “embattled” status to officially in need of rescue. One arrived courtesy of US-based kitchen appliance maker Hamilton Beach Brands, but the company consequentially delisted.
Corre Energy, for its part, spent most of 2024 watching its share price plunge. There was little else to do. The company develops underground storage facilities for renewable energy, but permit challenges have pushed back a crucial final investment decision on its key Zuidwending (ZW1) compressed air energy storage project in the Netherlands until after 2027.
Back in February, co-founder Darren Patrick-Green exited his president and executive director roles after an unrelated business he owned was linked by UK revenue officials to a tax avoidance scheme. In November, with Corre still desperately seeking a strategic investor, chief executive Keith McGrane stepped down. A search for new executive energy began.
The relief at the start of the year was that there appeared to be no sequel to “tech winter”, the job-shedding phenomenon of 2022-23 that had seen just about every technology company in town announce at least one round of redundancies.
But 2024 ended on a bum note for the indigenous sector after the Government opted not to extend the National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) accelerator programme – which trains, mentors and invests in start-ups – beyond its November 2025 end date. It was open-letter time.
More than 200 tech founders warned that if the Government didn’t reverse the decision, which they blasted as “disconnected from reality”, it would stymie future innovation and economic resilience. Alas, a general election had already been called by this point and no one was paying much attention.
Michael O’Leary, an early election headline-maker, more often than not appears in the winners’ section of this annual review. The longest-serving chief executive of any large airline doesn’t really have bad years, not relative to everyone else. The short-haul king doesn’t even have to crack a joke for a roomful of Fine Gael supporters to collapse with laughter because they think he has.
Alas, one of the key tasks to befall him in 2024 was to wait for multi-troubled Boeing to pony up the planes it owes his airline, and for that reason alone it can’t have been a hilarious year.
The new executives in charge of the US manufacturer “continue to disappoint”, O’Leary was heard lamenting in summer. By October, he seemed resigned to the likelihood of having to “walk back our traffic growth” as a result of delivery delays he summed up in characteristic style as a “pain in the backside”.
To the election, then. Losing slowly in count centres is a common fate, but presumably no less deflating for that. Caught up in a comprehensive greenlash, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin was second only to Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly on the high-profile casualties list.
Martin, who will be missed by an arts community she supported better than most, came under Oireachtas committee-grilling pressure in the spring after she appeared to stir up tensions from nowhere with then RTÉ chairwoman Siún Ní Raghallaigh over the precise nature of the information conveyed to her about the procedures followed when RTÉ reached an exit agreement with former RTÉ finance chief Richard Collins.
RTÉ hadn’t done anything wrong this time, but the organisation-reforming Ní Raghallaigh, baffled by the Minister’s arcane complaint, felt forced to resign, and later echoed Martin’s critics in the Opposition by accusing her of “taking a hands-off approach” to its various crises.
It seemed there was also nothing any Minister could do, meanwhile, about airport operator DAA’s strange obligation – thanks to a 32 million passenger cap mandated by planning laws – to actually suppress passenger numbers at Dublin Airport.
In August, the airport had the busiest month in its history. A good return on investment for the public money that is annually poured into promoting Ireland to potential overseas visitors? DAA chief executive Kenny Jacobs, frustrated by the uncertainty and branding the cap “not the best look for Ireland”, was not the only one wishing it was that simple.
As the year neared its close, one Irish export was confirmed as a toxic brand. Conor McGregor’s earning power unravelled at pace after a High Court jury upheld Nikita Hand’s civil claim that she was raped by the mixed martial arts fighter in a Dublin hotel.
IO Interactive, the Danish owner of the Hitman gaming franchise, was the first to “cease its collaboration”. Then, one by one, every retailer that had previously been keen to sell McGregor’s Forged Irish Stout and Proper No. Twelve Whiskey destocked them.
Proximo Spirits – the company to which McGregor sold his whiskey in 2021 – valiantly announced it would stop using his name and likeness in its marketing in a bid to save its acquisition. But with even the paraffin wax version of McGregor at the National Wax Museum taken out of circulation, the taint by association was unmistakable.
Let’s swiftly segue now to some bona fide winners via the spectre of Donald Trump, a man who showed us all in 2024 that being a judge-confirmed rapist is no barrier to becoming US president. Trump’s election victory threatens to make losers of vast tracts of the planet, if not the planet itself – a cheery thought to dwell on when Jools Holland’s Rhythm & Blues Orchestra breaks into its traditional Hootenanny rendition of Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think).
But if the world ends in 2025, at least some people can say they went out on a high.
Those highs were literal for Aer Lingus pilots. By late July, they were back in the air after a two-week work-to-rule period plus an eight-hour strike. Holding firm in the face of “management intransigence” meant they pocketed a 17.75 per cent pay increase – following a Labour Court recommendation – rather than the 12.25 per cent originally offered. They also won a boost to their allowances and swerved the rostering concessions sought by the IAG-owned airline.
Along the way, the travel plans of 90,000 passengers were disrupted while, as the dispute hit the headlines, social media users were quick to spy a certain resemblance between Capt Mark Tighe, president of the Irish Air Line Pilots’ Association, and one Captain Birdseye.
He won’t have cared. For the pilots, the outcome was, he said, “the greatest pay award seen in 30 years”.
After seeing his stock plummet within international tech circles in 2023, Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave ascended once again this year to cruising altitude. He was back as chief executive of the events group, having served a six-month hiatus to placate the tech luminaries who found his stance on Israel – that “war crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies” – controversial.
Some of them, including Meta and IBM, returned to sponsor this year’s event in Lisbon at which a more muted Cosgrave avoided any further turbulence.
A memorable main character of another kind was at the centre of the film Poor Things, in which Emma Stone played an adult woman implanted with a baby’s brain, bringing home four Oscars and a box office take of $117 million (€110 million).
This was heartening for fans of unsettling, offbeat fantasy cinema. But it was even more rewarding for Element Pictures, the prolific Dublin production company led by Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe, with the total of 11 Oscar nominations garnered by Poor Things setting a new record for the most ever secured by an Irish-produced film.
Another home-grown company generating joy was Smyth’s Toys. Accounts filed later in 2024 showed the retailer’s combined pretax profits across the regions in which it operates hit €54.6 million in 2023. That’s a lot of Lego.
Indeed, with its businesses in the Republic and Northern Ireland now representing just 14 per cent of its total revenues, the Mayo brothers behind Smyth’s Toys have made expansion across Europe look like child’s play.
Also doing well overseas was Co Tyrone’s Sarah Friar, the former chief executive of neighbourhood social networking service Nextdoor, who in June joined artificial intelligence hype-lodestone OpenAI as its chief financial officer, working alongside Sam “superintelligence” Altman.
Another appointment of note came in December when Trump nominated Dublin-born Gail Slater as assistant attorney general at the US department of justice’s antitrust division. “Together, we will Make America Competitive Again!” the president-elect posted on Truth Social.
Making America Healthy Again, genuinely, were the EY Entrepreneur(s) of the Year: Sharon Cunningham and Orlaith Ryan, the chief executive and chief technology officer respectively of Clonmel-headquartered Shorla Oncology.
Their company, which raised $45 million this year, counts four US Food and Drug Administration-approved products within a growing portfolio of accessible, life-saving treatments for patients with rare, orphan and paediatric cancers. At the ceremony, Ryan described the award as “validation” for the Shorla team’s years of hard work.
But whatever happened to those erstwhile Iseq stalwarts after they upped sticks from the Dublin stock market?
It was onwards and upwards for Tony Smurfit as he moved seamlessly from his role as boss of cardboard box-making giant Smurfit Kappa to the new position of group chief executive of packaging mega-giant Smurfit Westrock. This followed July’s formal seal on the Irish company’s deal to merge with US peer WestRock.
Smurfit Westrock, which has its primary listing on the New York Stock Exchange, reported a net loss for its first quarter as a merged group, booking $500 million (€461 million) of expenses and accounting adjustments related to the transaction. But its earnings otherwise pointed to “a strong foundation to build upon”, said a confident Smurfit.
True, not every athlete at Paris 2024 was a huge fan of the sustainable cardboard beds the company supplied to the Olympic Village. The good news, however, is that these have now been recycled into “the equivalent of 1.5 million wine boxes”. Cheers!
Cement-maker CRH, for a long time the largest stock on the Iseq, found itself enjoying New York life. In the 12 months after it relocated its main listing to Wall Street, its share price swelled 60 per cent. By autumn, it seemed not even bad weather could leave much of an imprint on its performance.
It will be all change for the company in 2025, with acquisition-loving chief executive Albert Manifold set to be succeeded in the top job by his finance chief, Jim Mintern. Manifold earned $13.2 million (€11.9 million) last year, hanging on to his title as the highest paid boss of an Irish plc, but Mintern could be in line for an even bigger bonanza, with the company indicating that its “compensation structures will evolve to more closely align with US practices”. Insert dollar signs here.
Will gambling company Flutter Entertainment have a ka-ching of a 2025? You wouldn’t bet against it. The owner of Paddy Power and Betfair, led by chief executive Peter Jackson, recently snapped up Italy’s Snaitech and a 56 per cent stake in Brazil’s Betnacional operator NSX Group – deals that give Flutter top three positions in most of the world’s regulated gambling markets.
National Football League (NFL) results didn’t quite go the way of its US brand FanDuel in October, but you can’t win them all – not in the short term. Over the medium term, as more US states legalise sports betting, FanDuel and Flutter remain poised to cash in.
There were comebacks of sorts this year for two Irishmen who both resigned from their previous roles after different forms of misconduct.
Declan Kelly – who quit his global public relations firm Teneo in 2021 after accusations of drunken misbehaviour at a charity concert – spent 2024 signing up sports stars and business names for his new-ish advisory vehicle Consello, which expanded its operations into Ireland.
As for former BP chief executive Bernard Looney, he was “wishing BP well”, he said, as joined the board of US data centre company Prometheus Hyperscale a year after he was obliged to resign from the oil giant for failing to disclose past relationships with colleagues. Having spent 32 years at BP, Looney (54) told the Financial Times he was “thinking about the next 32 years” of his career. Same, Bernard, same.
It may take almost that long to assess the full ramifications of the creeping change and dramatic power swings we witnessed and endured in 2024. But for now, with the tendrils of Christmas already starting to unwrap, the only thing left to do is to wish everyone who deserves them many sustainably profitable returns in 2025 – and everyone who doesn’t, none.
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