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Irish Times
35 minutes ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Centra store in Cork City revealed as €250m EuroMillions winning ticket seller
Clifford's Centra in Shandon Street, Cork City has been revealed as the seller of last Tuesday's €250 million EuroMillions jackpot win. The top prize was the biggest ever jackpot win in Ireland. The winner, who has not yet been named, became Ireland's 18th EuroMillions jackpot winner since 2005, and they also became the National Lottery's 13th millionaire of 2025. The National Lottery has also confirmed that the winner has made contact with its prize claims team. READ MORE [ Dolores McNamara: Whatever happened to the €115m lotto winner? Opens in new window ] 'We are absolutely thrilled to have heard from our EuroMillions winner,' said Emma Monaghan, spokesperson for the National Lottery, on Thursday. 'At this point, our priority is to give them the necessary time and space to make arrangements and let this life-changing news sink in.'
RTÉ News
2 hours ago
- Sport
- RTÉ News
LOI preview: Cork at low ebb as Hoops keep motoring
Unreliability has been a fabric within this year's SSE Airtricity Men's Premier Division but perhaps two of the more predictable sides will clash at Tallaght Stadium tonight. At points this season nearly all of the chasing pack to Shamrock Rovers have put together a period of form to indicate they could be challengers, or at least move into the European positions. The bottom two sides are the exception and undoubtedly the team sitting in the automatic relegation position have found it hardest in most recent times. Cork City have recorded just two wins in 19 matches and last week's loss to Bohemians was a real low point in their year. They make the journey to south Dublin tonight as huge outsiders against a team that are looking like coasting to the title. With no clean sheet all season, City have been consistent in letting goals in. The positive is they've scored in 16 of their 19 games so the problem is quite evident. How they attempt to solve it will ultimately decide their campaign and games such as this one may not prove decisive. The manner in which they succumbed to Bohs would have had alarm bells ringing for the Rebel Army watching on. Anything they can take from Tallaght would be a massive bonus. The Hoops are in juggernaut mode at the most crucial time of the season. With the games coming thick and fast, they have gone 10 without losing ahead of a double-round of matches over three days. Their lead is nine points and Monday's derby with Bohemians could really turn the title race into a procession. For now, Stephen Bradley wants his side to improve on a 1-1 draw against City in Turner's Cross. "I'm nearly sure I played against Ger (Nash) back in the day with Ipswich v Arsenal. I did a few courses with Ger also, he's a very good coach and I'm sure he'll do good things with Cork. You can see little things he's trying to change already, it won't happen overnight, but I'm sure he'll be very good there. I had a few conversations with Ger on those courses, he knows his football and he's clever, so I think he'll be very good at Cork. "When you have Sean Maguire, Djenairo Daniels and Cathal O'Sullivan, their attacking threat with those three is as good as any in the country. Seán Maguire's movement is very similar to Padraig Amond, very good and very clever, O'Sullivan is a very good young player and Daniels causes real problems so they must be respected and Cork as a team must be also." Adam Matthews is the only other absentee for the home side. Bohemians are the next in line to challenge the Hoops, with a match in Waterford their latest challenge. The Blues were on a winning run of four matches but have hit a minor slump, including a loss in Sligo last week where they struggled to create chances despite dominating the ball. Alan Reynolds is visiting his hometown club, with eight wins out of 10 games a remarkable turnaround in their season. One of those two loss came against this weekend's opposition where it was Waterford hanging on for victory. Reynolds feels he knows what to expect at the RSC: "Waterford are a good side. They had a great record against us last season and they've beaten us already in Dalymount this season, so it's another game where I think we're going into it with something to prove. "That means we need everyone to be at their very best once more if we want to keep the run we've been on going. "But as I said last week, we have a really determined group of players who keep pushing each other week in week out to get even better. "They've had the dark days at the start of the season and they've had the good days on the run we've been on over the past two months, and they are desperate to do everything they can to keep it going and to build on it." St Patrick's Athletic are at something of a crossroads in their season. With the European campaign to come, which has given them hope of putting a run together, their league hopes have taken a battering. Stephen Kenny is trying to inspire a performance ahead of a visit to Galway United. He said: "We've got to rally around, everyone, the players, the staff, and the supporters to get behind each other and the team. It will be difficult game in Galway, we've got to go down there and try to get a big result. We are capable of getting two results on Friday and Monday and we've got to aspire to do that. "Now is the time for us to show our strength in adversity. When I was Under-21 manager of St Pat's many many years ago in my first ever coaching job, the slogan around the club crest at the time was Ni Neart Go Cur Le Cheile, meaning "There's No Strength Without Unity" and that is still synonymous with the club now and that's an important thing for us to remember." Damien Duff and Tiernan Lynch have lots in common as Shelbourne host Derry City in Tolka Park. Both managers have used the quote "it is us against the world" in their media work in the last four days. Siege mentalities are one thing, but points on the board have proved elusive for both sides in recent matches. Shels received a massive lift by defeating Pat's last Monday, with Duff feeling it can be a springboard to move back towards the top four. He said: "We spoke about that break being a bit of a reset and a chance to draw a line under what's come before. Granted, it started with a poor result against Shamrock Rovers, but the lads are in a good place mentally. "There's brilliant togetherness in the dressing room, as you'd expect, and more importantly, there's belief. How can you not be excited with the games we have coming up?" Duff was referencing the Champions League clash with Linfield in July in that thought. Europe is the last thing Drogheda United want to hear about as Sligo Rovers visit Sullivan and Lambe Park. As the European draws took place this week, hearts broke in Louth after seeing dreams dashed. The late defeat to Aaron Greene's goal for the league leaders on Monday only added to their woes. Sligo visit Drogheda tonight looking to stay off the bottom of the table. Manager John Russell has brought in Seb Quirk from Accrington Stanley this week and more new arrivals are expected. The Rovers boss is hoping to build on their victory over Waterford: "There's a long way to go this season and we made sure the players' feet were kept on the ground this week. This is going to be a really tough game for us as Drogheda is a really tough place to go. "They create a brilliant atmosphere up there and you need big players and big voices to get through that. On the back of last week's win, we're really looking forward to this one."
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Sport
- Irish Times
Joe Canning: Everything is coming together for Tipperary at the right time
At other times of the year, momentum is something that you can build towards. At this time of the season, nobody wants to be looking for it. The reality with the hurling quarter finals , though, is that at least two teams arrive damaged every year, and a third team are probably licking their wounds too. This year, Tipperary are the team coming with their tails up. Even though they finished third in Munster, there's hardly a mark on them. They haven't lost a game since they were beaten by Cork at the end of April, and that game was a free hit once Darragh McCarthy was sent off in the first minute. That's the only game they've lost since the league final. In the last couple of months, everything has come together. They were very good against Limerick , good enough against Waterford , excellent against Clare and professional against Laois . Their under-20s won a brilliant All-Ireland against Kilkenny and the crowds have come back. The whole mood has changed. Liam Cahill started the season pleading with the Tipp supporters to get behind the team. The memory of them being outnumbered five-to-one by Cork supporters for a game in Thurles last summer would still have been fresh in his mind. READ MORE The embarrassment of that day is long gone. There were four teams in Portlaoise last Saturday for a hurling and football double-header and the biggest crowd was from Tipp, even though everyone knew they were going to win handy. For the first time since early in 2023, Tipperary have momentum. There's an energy about them. Half a dozen of the under-20s are on the senior panel and three of them have made a breakthrough this year: McCarthy, Sam O'Farrell and Oisín O'Donoghue. Tipp needed that injection of freshness. They have more consistency in key positions, and they needed that stability too. Ronan Maher is no longer going around putting out fires: he's their number six and that's it. Eoghan Connolly is the established full back now, even though there is a doubt about his fitness for this weekend. Jake Morris and Andrew Ormonde have been effective at centre forward at different times and both of them have been terrific. John McGrath has come back in from the margins and has had a brilliant championship at full-forward, and his brother Noel has influenced games off the bench. The only big change they've made during the championship has been with the goalie. Otherwise, the spine of the team has been settled. Tipp haven't had that for a long time. Tipp is the kind of place where confidence tends to take off. When the provincial championships were finished, I saw Tipp supporters online mapping out their path to Croke Park: Laois, Galway, then Cork. In their minds, Laois and Galway were just stepping stones. When the Tipp crowd came back, that kind of thinking was going to come with them. Micheál Donoghue made it clear that Galway didn't play in the Leinster final the way they had planned. Photograph: Bryan Keane/Inpho Galway are not in that place at the moment. I didn't think they'd beat Kilkenny in the Leinster final , but I thought they'd bring a performance. I don't think anybody thought it would be like the game in Nowlan Park a few weeks earlier. For an hour it was just as bad. Galway have been here before, coming into a quarter final on the back of a disappointing Leinster final. The pattern, though, is that Galway have usually come up with something. The last time Galway lost at this stage of the championship was in 2013, when Clare beat us. Since then, Galway's record is five from five. I can't remember any year when we were bouncing into the quarter finals feeling great about ourselves. In 2016 we had been poor against Kilkenny in the Leinster final and were hammered in the media afterwards, but we still came out and beat Clare. Galway blew a Leinster final against Kilkenny two years ago but played very well against Tipp in the quarter-final two weeks later. When you look back at the teams from that match, Tipp have made more changes than Galway in the last two years. I've heard people say that Galway are still depending on players from the 2017 team for leadership, and it's hard to argue with that: the two Mannions, the two Burkes, Conor Whelan. [ Tipperary are back in the groove and Jake Morris admits county minors helped light the spark Opens in new window ] But how many leaders do you need on a team? It's a funny thing. Before we won the All-Ireland in 2017, people were always saying that we lacked leaders. Players from the team of the late 1980s – the last Galway team to win an All-Ireland before us – were always giving interviews, pointing out what we were lacking. It used to drive me mad. New leaders will emerge in this group too but it's hard for younger players to step into that role when results haven't been great. Since the 2017 All-Ireland final, Galway have won just one championship game in Croke Park – against Wexford in 2020, at the height of the pandemic. For the last few years Galway have been coming up short in big matches. In that environment, it's not easy for young players to flourish. I'm certain that Galway will come up with something this weekend. After the Leinster final Micheál Donoghue made it clear that Galway didn't play the way they had planned. They've had a fortnight to sort that out. They obviously need more from their forwards: not just a higher work rate, but more scores. The whole package. Cathal Mannion's form has been outstanding but whatever he scores won't be enough unless others chip in. [ Galway's Fintan Burke bullish in advance of championship quarter-final against Tipp Opens in new window ] When Galway and Tipp met in the quarter final two years ago Conor Whelan scored 1-4 from play. That year he was playing in his customary position close to goal; this year he has been playing in the half-forward line. They need him there as a target for puck-outs, but it also means Galway's threat close to goal has been reduced. That's a hard balancing act. I'm convinced that we'll see a positive response from Galway on Saturday. I hope the Galway crowd turn up, but I wouldn't be sure about that. The Tipp crowd definitely will. They're on a roll. It might not stop this weekend.
Irish Times
4 hours ago
- Business
- Irish Times
How can we stop corporate gombeen men running amok again? Credit unions could be the answer
One of the pioneers of co-operative societies in Ireland, Horace Plunkett (1854-1932), established his first co-operative creamery at Ballyhahill, Limerick , in 1891. He raised the hackles of 'gombeen men', the trader money lenders who thrived on the isolation of individuals in need of finance and charged them crippling interest rates. Plunkett's efforts, helped by others such as writer and artist George William Russell and the Jesuit Fr Tom Finlay, included the establishment of agricultural credit societies, sometimes called village or land banks, of which there were 268 by 1908. They were the forerunners of the modern credit unions . Plunkett's biographer Trevor West has suggested one of his aims in reorganising rural commerce was to restore 'a sense of dignity, a spirit of self-reliance, and an air of optimism'. Fifty years later, Nora Herlihy from Cork , a teacher in Dublin from 1936, devoted to underprivileged students and disturbed by the poverty surrounding them, established an exploratory group, the Credit Union Extensive Services, at her house in Phibsborough. She encouraged a group of neighbours to form Ireland's first credit union in Donore Avenue. John Hume in Derry in the 1960s also played a key role in the credit union movement, which he regarded as one of his most important jobs. By 1975, there were 453 credit unions in operation, including 93 in Northern Ireland , performing, in the words of Plunkett, 'the apparent miracle of giving solvency to a community composed almost entirely of insolvent individuals'. At the time of Herlihy's death in 1988 there were almost one million members in more than 500 branches; today, credit unions affiliated to the Irish League of Credit Unions (ILCU), under one of its slogans, 'For Living, Not Profit', have 3.6 million members throughout Ireland. READ MORE Credit unions worked in spite of initial official scepticism. The Irish banking commission in 1938 was dismissive of the idea the State could perform any useful function in relation to co-operative agricultural credit, while the much lauded blueprint Economic Development by TK Whitaker in 1958 asserted that 'history affords no support for the belief that co-operative credit societies can be successfully established'. With the Credit Union Act of 1966, however, came statutory recognition of the co-operative concept. This week, as Allied Irish Bank reverted to full private ownership, it was revealed mortgage lending by credit unions i ncreased by 34 per cent to €632 million in the three months to the end of March, compared with the same period last year. The total credit union loan book now stands at €6.08 billion, its highest since 2008. ILCU chief executive David Malone said the group was 'eagerly awaiting' changes to the Central Bank's lending rules, which could see credit unions treble their mortgage lending from the current cap of €1.9 billion on the back of a proposed new loan limit of 30 per cent of total credit union assets on house lending. Malone has made much of harnessing the 'collective might' of the credit unions: 'We get our funding from our members' savings. We don't have corporate shareholders, and we are not subject to quarterly results forecasts.' Some within the credit union movement will have reservations about such expansion, given the historic rootedness of the credit unions in the community, dealing with smaller scale financing. However, with the stranglehold of the pillar banks on mortgage lending, it is surely a positive to see member-owned financial institutions making inroads in this area. [ How AIB went from boom to bust and back again Opens in new window ] This week AIB stated it 'profoundly regrets that the institution had to be rescued by the State almost two decades ago and owes an immense debt of gratitude to Irish taxpayers for the support provided during that challenging time.' Indeed it does. AIB recorded a profit after tax of €2.35 billion last year; its new mortgage lending was up 14 per cent to €4.5 billion, reflecting a mortgage market share of 36 per cent, while total new lending increased by 17 per cent to €14.5 billion. Last year, AIB and Bank of Ireland had a combined mortgage market share of more than 75 per cent while credit unions held less than 1 per cent. Corporate gombeen men ran amok during the Celtic Tiger . The Irish banking management culture was reprehensible in relation to customer charges, interest rates, facilitation of tax evasion and calamitous risk taking. Patrick Honohan , governor of the Central Bank from 2009 to 2015, subsequently wrote Currency, Credit and Crisis: Central Banking in Ireland and Europe (2019) , highlighting an enduring culture of corporate entitlement, limited capacity 'to achieve decisive reforms of culture', deferential regulators, lenient responses to abuses, and a Central Bank that had been far too passive. Theologist and philosopher Gabriel Flynn summed up the consequences: with 'the banking sector dominating societal decisions or overriding other community considerations, the inevitable result is an infringement of human dignity'. It is to be hoped that a greater role for credit unions might lead to a diluting of such violations.
Irish Examiner
4 hours ago
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Cork Airport named best in Europe for third time
Cork Airport was named the best airport in Europe, under five million passengers, at the Airport Council International (ACI) Europe Best Airport Awards held in Athens on Thursday night. It is the third time Cork Airport has won the award, having won it previously in 2017 and 2019. The award acknowledges Cork's excellence in passenger experience, operational efficiency, route development, sustainability and innovation. "This recognition is thoroughly deserved," Olivier Jankovec, ACI Europe director general, said. "The airport team has worked tirelessly to enhance operational efficiency, offer exceptional passenger experience, and deliver on ambitious environmental and sustainability goals. Their success is clearly reflected in increased air connectivity and passenger numbers, which means a growing contribution from the airport to the regional economy, tourism and competitiveness. Last year, Cork Airport saw 10% passenger growth to 3.2 million passengers, forecast to rise this year to 3.4 million passengers. In May, it announced a €200m investment by Dublin Airport Authority in the development of new infrastructure, including an extended mezzanine floor, larger duty-free shop, bigger executive lounge, additional car park spaces, more boarding gates, new aircraft stands, and a new pier to facilitate growth up to five million passengers. Taoiseach Micheál Martin congratulated Cork Airport. "It is clear that Cork Airport is going from strength to strength every year and this award is a reflection of the hard work and dedication of Niall MacCarthy and all his team there." Niall MacCarthy, Cork Airport's managing director, said: 'This award is a fantastic endorsement of the incredible people who make Cork Airport what it is — from our frontline teams to those behind the scenes, and everyone in between. It's also a reflection of the strong partnerships we've built with all our stakeholders, and the loyalty of our passengers who continue to choose Cork Airport.' Dublin Airport Authority chief executive Kenny Jacobs said the award was a huge recognition of the brilliant team on the ground. "This award's not just for the airport — it's for Cork, for Munster, and for Ireland. We have big plans for Cork, and this is a great boost," he said. Read More Rory Gallagher Avenue unveiled at Cork Airport to honour legendary guitarist's enduring legacy
