The state of AI in Ireland, November 2026

Ireland in November 2026 is an applied-AI country. Large firms report using the technology at roughly three times the rate of small ones. Dublin hosts the European commercial offices of companies that build frontier models. The public research system has just been refunded at a new scale. The national supercomputer that would replace Kay is still in procurement. And the law that will govern high-risk systems is on the statute book, with most of those duties not yet in force.

This report is a reading of the official pages linked in the text, written on 11 November 2026. It is a map of what those pages actually say. Where two official sources disagree, both figures are kept. It is not legal, financial or grant advice, and it is not a ranking of Irish AI companies.

A shorter, practical note on which public supports pay for which kind of AI work is in Funding an AI project in Ireland. The argument for deciding where a European organisation’s models run is in Where your intelligence lives.

What the figures are counting

Four numbers are easy to collapse into one claim that “Ireland is ahead on AI”. They count different things, in different years, with different methods.

About one firm in five says it uses AI. The Central Statistics Office, in Information Society Statistics — Enterprises 2025, published on 6 February 2026, reports that 20.2% of enterprises used AI in 2025, up from 15.2% in 2024 and 8.1% in 2023. Small enterprises, those with 10 to 49 people, were at 17.2%. Medium enterprises were at 28.6%. Large enterprises were at 57.7%. The most common uses across all enterprises were data mining, at 10.8%, and natural-language generation, at 9.3%. Image recognition was 2.8%. Autonomous machine movement was 0.8%.

Eurostat’s publication of the same survey family, The use of artificial intelligence technologies in the European Union, prints 19.6% for Ireland and about 20% for the EU. The same Ireland figure is reprinted, with the size split, in the CSO’s Business in Ireland 2025 table. The CSO says its Ireland figure can differ from Eurostat’s because of the population totals used for the percentages. 20.2% and 19.6% are two publications of one survey. Denmark, in the 11 December 2025 Eurostat release and the statistics article, was at 42.0%.

The survey covers enterprises with at least 10 people, in a defined set of industries. Agriculture, finance, health and education are largely outside it, as the Eurostat statistics article sets out. A micro-business in Waterford is not in the 20.2%. “Used AI” is a self-reported yes to a list that includes text mining, speech recognition, language or image generation, machine learning and workflow automation. A firm that turned on a feature in a product it already pays for can count.

A much larger share of working-age people show up in one vendor’s telemetry. The Stanford AI Index Report 2026, Economy chapter, reprints a Microsoft AI Economy Institute series in which 44.6% of Ireland’s working-age population is classed as an AI user in the second half of 2025, fourth in that chart, after the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and Norway. The method, described in Measuring AI Diffusion, scales Windows telemetry of visits to named AI sites. The authors say the reliance on Microsoft telemetry introduces bias, and that countries with low opt-in, including parts of Europe, are blended toward a global average. A person who opened a chatbot once on a tracked desktop can count. A hospital that embedded a model in an imaging workflow may not.

AI skills on LinkedIn are a third measure. The same Stanford report, drawing on LinkedIn, puts AI talent at 1.31% of LinkedIn members in Ireland in 2025. That means a member who listed at least two AI engineering skills, or who works or worked in an AI occupation. The denominator is LinkedIn’s membership, not the labour force. It is not comparable to the share of workers who are ICT specialists.

ICT specialists are a large Irish workforce, and they are not AI specialists. Eurostat’s labour-force series, discussed in ICT specialists in employment, has Ireland at about 172,400 ICT specialists in 2025, 6.2% of employment, against an EU share of 5.0%. An ICT specialist, in that definition, is someone whose job is mainly developing, operating or maintaining ICT systems. A solicitor using a drafting tool is outside the count.

The Department of Enterprise’s note on the European Commission’s State of the Digital Decade, dated 14 August 2026, says Ireland ranks second in the EU for basic digital skills, at 83% against an EU average of 60%, and fifth for generative-AI adoption, at 45% against 33%. Eurostat’s own Skills for the digital age rounds the 2025 basic-skills figure to 83% of people aged 16 to 74 and says four countries had already passed the EU’s 2030 target of 80%: the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark and Finland. Basic digital skills mean a person did at least one listed activity in each of five areas. They are not a measure of who can evaluate a model.

The useful sentence is narrower than the headlines. Ireland has a high share of digitally skilled adults, a large ICT workforce, firm-level AI use that sits near the EU average and is concentrated in large companies, and a high rate of consumer and desktop tool use in one telemetry series. Those are four facts. They do not add up to a single rank.

Who is using it, and who is not

The size split is the adoption story that matters for most Irish businesses. In the CSO tables, a large enterprise is more than three times as likely as a small one to say it uses AI. A later CSO chapter on productivity and AI puts information-and-communication enterprises at 61.3% in 2025, up from 28.4% in 2023, and foreign-owned enterprises at 43.6%. The multinational layer and the indigenous SME layer are not having the same year.

IBEC, citing Skillnet Ireland’s Ireland’s Talent Landscape 2025 in Work just got smarter, says 73% of businesses surveyed named a lack of necessary skills as the greatest barrier to integrating AI. That is a survey citation inside an employer-body paper, not a CSO census. It matches the shape of the official size split: the constraint being named is capability inside the firm, not a shortage of products to buy.

Shadow use is already a management problem. The National Economic and Social Council, in Artificial Intelligence in Service of Society (29 April 2026), records a shadow-AI pattern. The NESC accessible text says 61% of managers in organisations that prohibit free AI tools reported knowing that employees still used them, citing Kumar Jha and Danks 2025. IBEC, citing Trinity CDBA and Microsoft 2025, gives the same pattern in its own wording: 80% of managers said free or public AI tools were in use, 13% of organisations strictly prohibited them, and 61% of that prohibiting group still reported a shadow-AI culture. The point of both sources is governance and training. Neither is a count of data breaches.

The Departments of Finance and Enterprise, in Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe (11 June 2024), estimated that 63% of Irish employment is in occupations exposed to AI, against a 60% advanced-economy average on the same method. Within that, 33% of employment is in occupations the method treats as complementary and 30% as a substitution risk. Dublin’s share in highly exposed roles is 71%. Finance and insurance, and information and communication, are the most exposed sectors. The departments say the index is built from a 2021 task study and an IMF method covering a narrow set of AI applications. It does not capture document summarisation, model search, or robots. Exposure is not a forecast of job loss.

Microsoft Ireland’s own workplace surveys are Ireland cuts, and they are vendor surveys. The 2024 Work Trend Index put AI adoption among Irish knowledge workers at 29%, in a sample of almost 700. The 2025 release says adoption was up 27% year on year, in a sample of 1,000 employees, and that 91% of board-level executives use AI at work against 39% of non-managers. The 2024 sample is knowledge workers. The 2025 sample is employees. “Up 27%” is a relative change, not a new level. The global 2024 Work Trend Index surveyed 31 markets, and Ireland is not in that market list. The Irish finding that is stable across both years is the demand for structured training.

The policy stack

Ireland’s first national AI strategy, AI – Here for Good, was launched on 8 July 2021. It is organised in eight strands: society, trustworthy governance, enterprise adoption, the public sector, research, skills, infrastructure, and implementation. The launch listed an AI innovation hub, a national cluster, testbeds, a public-service approach, and a skills study. The progress report published on 9 August 2023 is the last implementation stocktake found. No later official audit marks each 2021 deliverable complete or abandoned.

The National AI Strategy Refresh 2024, published on 6 November 2024, is an update, not a repeal. It keeps a person-centred approach and adds actions on the EU AI Act, an economy-wide impact study, an SME awareness campaign, a regulatory sandbox, a national AI research nexus, public-service experimentation, and access to advanced computing. The page lists intentions. It does not attach a budget or a completion date to each action.

On 18 February 2026 the government published a new national digital and AI strategy, Digital Ireland. The release describes five ambitions, 20 objectives and 90 deliverables to 2030, covering public services, enterprise, infrastructure, cybersecurity, regulation, online safety and skills. It does not give a single euro cost for the strategy, and it does not say the 2021 strategy was revoked. Implementation is led from the Department of the Taoiseach. Targets stated in the release include making key public services available online. A target is not a result.

On 13 October 2026, during the week of the International AI Summit at the RDS and Ireland’s EU Council presidency, the government launched Intelligence:Applied: 35 initiatives to 2030 under People, Economy, Infrastructure and Ecosystem, explicitly under Digital Ireland. The same release says the government approved a Cabinet Committee on AI, chaired by the Taoiseach. Named sums in that release include:

• €150 million for an AI Future Skills programme.
• €21 million for an AI startup accelerator.
• An additional €45 million by 2030 for national technology centres.
• €120 million to 2030 for Irish participation in EU Important Projects of Common European Interest.
• €200 million to 2030 for the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund.
• An ISIF allocation of €1 billion to 2030 for scaling companies. The release does not describe that billion as AI-only.
• An additional €17 million in Budget 2027 for a Digital Transformation Fund, plus €9 million ongoing for government digital infrastructure.

The same programme says more than 20,000 AI training sessions had already been undertaken in the public sector. The release does not define a session or the period. It also announces Tobar, a state dataset for Irish language, culture and tradition, intended to support Irish-language public services and models by 2030. That is a commitment. The dataset is not described as already released.

Two sentences in the same document date the national regulatory sandbox differently. A summary bullet says the sandbox programme will be established in 2027. Action 30 says the AI Office will roll it out over the next year. A reader should not pick one and drop the other. As of this report, the sandbox is a plan, not an open service. A May 2025 Dáil answer had already said the Department was still designing it against an earlier August 2026 EU deadline. The later EU simplification, on the Council’s timeline, moved the national sandbox deadline to 2 December 2027.

On 14 October 2026 the government said EU member states had backed a Dublin Declaration on Trusted, Safe and Sovereign Artificial Intelligence. A political declaration is not a new statute.

The law now in force

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the EU AI Act, entered into force on 1 August 2024. The Commission’s AI Act page is the cleanest public timeline. Prohibited practices and the original AI-literacy obligation applied from 2 February 2025. Governance rules and general-purpose model obligations applied from 2 August 2025. The Act became generally applicable on 2 August 2026, including transparency rules. From that date the European Commission’s AI Office, not an Irish body, enforces the rules on general-purpose AI models.

High-risk duties are not yet in force. After the AI Omnibus, which the Commission dates as entering into force on 27 July 2026, Annex III high-risk systems apply from 2 December 2027, and Annex I systems embedded in regulated products from 2 August 2028. The Council’s timeline records political agreement on the simplification in 2026 and a 2 December 2026 end to the grace period for marking and detecting artificially generated content. A further prohibition, on AI that generates non-consensual intimate images or child sexual abuse material, is dated by the Commission to December 2026. It was not in force on 11 November 2026.

Ireland’s national statute is the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Act 2026 (No. 31 of 2026). It establishes Oifig IS na hÉireann, the AI Office of Ireland. S.I. No. 404/2026 sets 31 July 2026 as the Office’s establishment day. S.I. No. 403/2026 commenced the Act that day, with two paragraphs of the definition of “applicable market surveillance authority” left uncommenced: the paragraphs covering Coimisiún na Meán and the Data Protection Commission. The Department’s description of the Office calls it the national coordinating authority. Section 42 makes it the single point of contact under the EU regulation and revokes the earlier designation of the Minister for that role. The earlier designation instrument is S.I. No. 366/2025.

Single point of contact is not the same as sole regulator. S.I. No. 405/2026, made on 31 July 2026, splits market surveillance. Annex I product surveillance is divided among the Health and Safety Authority, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, the Marine Survey Office, the Commission for Communications Regulation, the Commission for Railway Regulation and the Health Products Regulatory Authority. Annex III surveillance includes the Data Protection Commission for specified points covering law enforcement, border management, justice, democracy, education and biometrics; the Workplace Relations Commission for employment; the Central Bank for specified financial-service uses; the HSE for specified healthcare uses; and ComReg, the National Transport Authority and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities for specified critical-infrastructure uses. Coimisiún na Meán’s AI Act page says it is one of 15 market surveillance authorities and a fundamental-rights authority. These designations are institutional. They are not evidence that high-risk duties are already being enforced, because those duties start in December 2027 and August 2028.

On 29 September 2026 the Minister told the Dáil that the Office had a public website and service desk, that its board had met for the first time in September, and that the priorities for the following year were the sandbox, an AI-literacy programme, a pool of technical expertise for other authorities, and recruitment. The answer does not give a budget or a headcount. Establishment is not a fully staffed regulator.

Data protection is a separate regime, and it is already active

The Data Protection Commission’s AI work is GDPR supervision of companies for which Ireland is often the EU lead authority. It is not an AI Act fine. On 18 July 2024 the DPC published guidance for organisations using AI and large language models: lawful basis, purpose limitation, transparency, security, retention, data-subject rights, memorisation, inaccurate or biased outputs, automated decision-making, and a data protection impact assessment where processing is new or involves children or vulnerable people.

The public record since then is a sequence of interventions, not a stack of published fines:

• On 8 August 2024, against the backdrop of an urgent High Court application, X agreed to suspend processing of personal data in public posts of EU and EEA users, processed between 7 May and 1 August 2024, for training Grok. On 4 September 2024 the proceedings were struck out because X agreed to keep that undertaking. The DPC described this as the first use of section 134 of the Data Protection Act 2018. The outcome in those statements is an undertaking, not a published fine and not a finding that all Grok training is unlawful.
• On 11 April 2025 the DPC opened an inquiry into whether personal data in public posts of EU and EEA users were lawfully processed to train Grok. No final decision on that inquiry was found for this report.
• On 17 February 2026 the DPC opened a separate inquiry into X concerning the apparent creation and publication of potentially harmful non-consensual intimate or sexualised images, including of children, using Grok. Opening an inquiry is not a finding.
• On 21 May 2025 the DPC’s statement on Meta said Meta had paused LLM training in June 2024, that an EDPB opinion issued in December 2024, and that Meta had changed notices and assessments before training planned for 27 May 2025. The statement does not say the DPC approved the processing.
• On 7 November 2025 the DPC’s statement on LinkedIn records changes LinkedIn made to a training plan, and then says, in terms: the DPC has not approved, or found compliant, LinkedIn’s use of users’ personal data for generative-AI training.

The DPC’s report Responsible Artificial Intelligence Innovation (PDF), published on 24 September 2026, says its technology-multinational unit engaged on about 180 AI products and services between 2021 and 2025, including work with Airbnb, Apple, Deepseek, Google, LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Pinterest, TikTok, X and others. Generative-AI engagements rose from 25 in 2023 to 36 in 2024 and 82 in 2025. In 2024 and 2025 combined, 59% of AI products or services in that set that launched in the EU were issued with recommendations. The report says supervision does not state that a product is GDPR-compliant. The counts are engagements with large technology controllers, not a census of Irish SMEs and not a fine table.

For an Irish organisation buying or building a system, the practical reading is ordinary and strict. GDPR applies now, to training data and to deployment. The AI Act’s prohibitions and transparency duties are already in the calendar. The high-risk conformity regime is dated, not optional, and it is not yet the day-to-day enforcement story. The Irish coordinator is new. The sectoral authorities are named. Neither fact makes a deployer compliant.

Copyright is still advice, not a rewritten Act

The AI Advisory Council’s February 2025 paper, The Impact of AI on Ireland’s Creative Sector, says Irish law allows commercial text and data mining unless the author has reserved rights or the rightsholder is unduly prejudiced, while the EU directive it implements speaks of the rightsholder reserving rights. The Council says that mismatch causes confusion, that the Copyright Act’s computer-generated-works clause is a poor fit for generative AI, and that the government should consider a human-authorship rule, a shorter right for AI-generated works, and a law against digital deepfakes made without consent. That is advice. It is not a change in the Copyright Act. Revenue-at-risk figures in the paper come from a CISAC-commissioned study, not an Irish census of creators.

Money for companies

Public supports and venture totals are different pools. Mixing them produces a number that no agency publishes.

Grants and vouchers

The Department’s page What AI and digital supports are available to me, current as of 27 May 2026, still describes a pathway: a free Local Enterprise Office readiness assessment, the Grow Digital Voucher to start, European Digital Innovation Hubs and Enterprise Ireland’s Digital Discovery grant to experiment, Digital Process Innovation and the Digital Transition Fund to scale, and R&D supports including the Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund for larger collaborative work.

The figures that were still the published ones in the brochures read for this report:

• Digital Discovery.Enterprise Ireland’s 2026 brochure funds up to 80% of project cost, to a maximum grant of €5,000, for a digital expert for 3 to 7 days over 8 to 12 weeks. The eligible daily cost is capped at €900 including travel. It is for Irish businesses in manufacturing or internationally traded services, and for Enterprise Ireland high-potential start-ups. The brochure describes analysis and an action plan. It does not say the grant buys software licences, hardware, or a production system.
• Grow Digital.The Local Enterprise Office brochure current as of July 2025 is 50% of eligible costs, a minimum grant of €500 and a maximum of €5,000, for small enterprises with 1 to 50 paid employees that are not Enterprise Ireland or IDA clients. Eligible spend is new off-the-shelf software and limited training. Custom software is not eligible. The Waterford office publishes the same scheme on its Grow Digital page.
• Digital Process Innovation.Enterprise Ireland’s brochure offers SMEs and large companies 50% of eligible costs, to a maximum grant of €150,000, for implementing new production or delivery methods. It is not an AI-only scheme. The National Enterprise Hub states extra conditions, including a minimum spend, that are not in the brochure extract. Treat those as a second official description and confirm them with the agency.

On 20 October 2026 the Minister told the Dáil that Digital for Business and the Grow Digital Voucher had been renamed Digital and AI for Business and the Grow Digital and AI Voucher, and that the scope had widened toward AI readiness, AI functionality, enhancements to existing software, and implementation. The answer does not state a new rate or a new euro cap. The wider name is real. A higher ceiling was not published in that answer.

The Digital Transition Fund is a different instrument. A Dáil answer of 28 May 2025 said €85 million was available for digital transformation of enterprise under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, of which the Digital Transition Fund is €58 million, administered by Enterprise Ireland, IDA Ireland and Údarás na Gaeltachta. The Department’s programme page describes the fund without restating that split. At the end of the first quarter of 2025, 578 companies had been approved €47.3 million and 223 had been paid €14.7 million. Those are not 2026 outturn figures. The Budget 2027 €17 million “Digital Transformation Fund” in the Intelligence:Applied release is a separate sentence. The two should not be merged.

The Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund is described by the Department as a €500 million Project Ireland 2040 fund, with over €530 million awarded to 131 projects across seven calls. The page does not explain how the awarded total exceeds the named fund, and it does not say what share is AI. A February 2025 Dáil answer said nearly half of an older total had gone to projects integrating AI. That fraction belonged to the older total. Call 8 was announced on 9 June 2026, opened on 1 October 2026 and closes on 3 February 2027, with a €40 million budget. The applicant guide requires at least €1.5 million of DTIF funding, at least three independent partners including one SME, and Irish-based enterprise partners. AI is not an eligibility category. A project has to be disruptive innovation and pass state-aid checks. Intelligence:Applied’s later commitment of €200 million to 2030 for the DTIF is a further sentence, not a reconciliation of the €500 million and the €530 million.

IDA Ireland’s supports are for its own client base. Its RD&I guidelines say projects in digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, should be discussed with the IDA project executive because a different document set may be required. IDA’s incentives page states a 35% tax credit on eligible RD&I expenditure. That is a tax credit described by IDA, not an AI-only cash grant. The 2026 training-grant guide includes AI among digitisation skills, with aid up to 50% and a maximum grant of €3 million for training plans that meet IDA’s scale tests. It is not a voucher for a single course.

Eligibility is decided by the agencies. A written scope helps an application. It does not create an entitlement. Leemer Group does not claim approved-provider status for any of these programmes.

Venture capital, counted three ways

The Irish Venture Capital Association’s VenturePulse series is equity into Irish SMEs, excluding venture debt. It is the cleanest domestic time series, and it does not treat “AI” as the whole market.

• 2024.€1.48 billion, up 9%, across 217 deals. Life sciences were €552.9 million. The published sector table does not have an AI line. The chair said AI accounted for over €100 million, and named Nuritas’s €42 million round as an AI deal. “Over €100 million” is the chair’s statement.
• 2025.€1.1 billion, down 23%, the first annual fall since 2018, across 186 deals. AI and machine learning appears as a sector line for the first time in this series, at €104 million, 9% of the total. Life sciences were €461 million. Companies are classed by core sector, so a fintech or health firm that uses AI is not inside the €104 million. IVCA linked weaker overseas money in part to US investors concentrating on home AI deals. That is IVCA’s interpretation.
• First half of 2026.€578.4 million, down 10% on the year before. International capital was 82% of the half. AI and machine learning was 7% by the same sector label. The first quarter alone was €221.7 million, down 58%, with AI at 2% on that label. Sarah-Jane Larkin of IVCA said the sector label understates AI because products in other sectors now embed it.

Enterprise Ireland, publishing PitchBook on 12 October 2026, counted €691.3 million across 107 Irish AI deals in 2025 and €256 million across 75 deals in 2026 to that date. PitchBook’s AI tag is far wider than IVCA’s €104 million line. The largest named deals include Wayflyer and Tines. Those companies are not foundation-model laboratories. Ireland is ranked, in that PitchBook cut, ninth in Europe by AI venture-deal count and second per capita. The rank is a deal-count rank under PitchBook’s definition, for a partial year, not a rank of research output.

Enterprise Ireland’s own cheques are much smaller than either series. In 2025 it invested €32.9 million in 198 startups and said 99 of those had AI as a central part of the product. That is the agency’s money and its own definition. It is not the venture market.

TechIreland’s broader startup series, which includes Northern Ireland and a wider set of deals, sits near €979 million for 2024 and €992 million for 2025 in its 2026 funding review. In the pages used here it discusses AI-enabled products and does not publish a separate euro total that can be set beside IVCA’s sector line.

The sentence worth keeping: Irish venture funding fell in 2025 and was still falling, more gently, in the first half of 2026. Life sciences remained the largest labelled sector. AI is both a labelled slice of about a tenth of IVCA equity and a much larger tagged slice in PitchBook. Reporting only the larger number, or only the smaller one, changes the story.

Research, including the south-east

On 10 June 2026 Research Ireland announced seven new centres under the name Rinn, with €460 million of public research investment over eight years. A further €500 million is “to be leveraged” from industry and other sources. That half-billion is a target, not cash received. The seven centres together are described as supporting 577 research positions and developing over 800 PhDs, across 17 research-performing organisations. Those posts and PhDs are for all seven centres, not for AI alone. Activities start on 1 July 2026.

Rinn Artificial Intelligence, “Research & Innovation in Data Science and AI”, is the largest of the seven awards: €121,752,497. Research Ireland says Rinn AI and Rinn Quantum support the Digital Ireland commitments to an AI research centre of scale and a quantum centre of excellence. The other public awards are Advanced Therapies €51.1 million, Energy €51.8 million, Medical Devices €64.5 million, Pharma and Biopharma €60.3 million, Quantum €39.6 million, and Semiconductors €71.0 million. The participating organisations include South East Technological University, Trinity, UCD, DCU, University of Galway, UCC, UL, TU Dublin, Maynooth, MTU, TUS, ATU, Dundalk IT, Tyndall, RCSI, the ESRI and NIBRT.

This does not mean the older centres vanished on 1 July.

• Insighthosted at DCU, University of Galway, UCC and UCD, describes Rinn AI as the next chapter of the data and AI ecosystem built by Insight and ADAPT. Its own historical figures — a 2013 establishment on its governance page, later SFI awards, and a 2019 economic-impact claim — are about earlier periods. They are not a 2026 audit of Rinn.
• ADAPTthe Research Ireland centre for AI-driven digital content, is coordinated by Trinity and co-hosted by DCU. Its phase-2 award, announced on 1 February 2021, was €42,090,078 over six years. It was still publishing research news in November 2026, including work at the AI Accountability Lab. Separate project awards, such as CHIST-ERA funding that includes Irish scientific terminology, should not be added to the core grant.
• Leroat the University of Limerick, is the software centre. Its phase-2 award, in the same 1 February 2021 release, was €37,449,510. AI is one of its application domains, as the centre’s own description says. It is not an AI-only centre, and its award should not be folded into an “Irish AI budget”.
• CeADARat UCD with TU Dublin, is the Enterprise Ireland and IDA technology centre for applied data analytics and machine intelligence, and the national AI hub for firms. It is an adoption and test-before-invest centre, not the successor to Insight. Its published allocations differ by instrument: a departmental line of €1.9 million a year on the digital and AI strategy page, a 2025 European Digital Innovation Hub allocation of €4.22 million in the 18 February 2025 Dáil answer, and a phase-2 EDIH figure of €5.675 million for 2026–2029 stated by CeADAR and NovaUCD. Those are different years and different instruments.
• CRT-AIhosted at UCC, is the national PhD training centre in artificial intelligence. The centre says it was established in 2019 with over €14 million from Science Foundation Ireland and €3.3 million from partners, aiming at 120 PhD graduates. Science Foundation Ireland’s centre page names the same programme. The euro amounts are the centre’s own statement.

Waterford is inside this map, at a different scale from the national centre. South East Technological University is one of the 17 Rinn research-performing organisations. SETU said on 11 June 2026 that Dr Ray Griffin and Dr Aisling Tuite are in Rinn AI, that Dr Deirdre Kilbane of the Walton Institute is in Rinn Quantum, and that the Pharmaceutical and Molecular Biotechnology Research Centre is in Rinn Pharma. On 14 April 2026 Research Ireland awarded the Walton AI Facility €1,034,261 inside a €17 million infrastructure round. The official description is an advanced AI and high-performance computing cluster for national collaboration and industry-focused AI. SETU’s own news, dated 15 April 2026, says the facility will deliver up to 100 times the institute’s current computing capacity, and that it will enable large-scale model training. That multiple, and the training claim, are the institute’s description of its existing Waterford data centre. No GPU count or FLOPS figure is in the Research Ireland release. Walton’s published AI work is applied vision and machine learning: image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation. It is a real research cluster. It is not the national supercomputer, and it is not a frontier-model laboratory.

The south-east’s position, on the documents, is participation in the national centres plus a modest new cluster in Waterford. The €121.8 million sits with the Rinn AI consortium, not with a single campus. Anyone in Waterford who wants research compute at national scale still has to look to ICHEC, to EuroHPC access, and to whatever the Walton cluster actually fields once it is installed.

Compute, and the electricity beside it

Ireland’s public AI compute and Ireland’s data-centre electricity are different systems. Treating the second as evidence of the first is how the energy debate gets the science wrong, and how the science debate gets the energy wrong.

Kay is no longer the national service. ICHEC’s hardware page still describes Kay in the present tense: installed in August 2018, a Linpack result of 665 teraflops, a CPU partition of 336 nodes, and a GPU partition of 16 nodes with two NVIDIA V100 16 GB cards each. That is 32 V100s. ICHEC’s later interim-service notice says Kay reached the end of its five-year service life in November 2023, ran at risk until June 2024, and that the national service moved to an interim allocation on Luxembourg’s MeluXina. The notice is the status. The hardware page is the specification of a machine whose service life has ended. 665 teraflops is about 0.665 petaflops.

CASPIr is the funded successor, and it is not in service. A hosting agreement with the University of Galway was signed in October 2025, as the university and ICHEC reported. EuroHPC launched the procurement on 27 March 2026. The JU describes a mid-range system capable of performing over 15 petaflops, with an acquisition budget of up to €25 million, 35% from EuroHPC and 65% from Ireland, supporting small-scale AI training and inference inside larger simulation and data-analysis workflows. ICHEC says the machine will not have sufficient capability for large-scale AI training, and that users who need that should apply to EuroHPC AI Factory systems. ICHEC estimates the national service for the third quarter of 2027, subject to supply chains and site works. No GPU type or GPU count had been published on the pages read for this report.

The Department’s release on the same procurement day says Exchequer funding will leverage €20 million awarded by the EuroHPC JU. That sentence does not match 35% of a €25 million budget. The two official figures are left as a conflict. They should not be averaged.

The AI Factory Antenna is access and support, not an Irish exascale cluster. The Commission’s CORDIS record for AIF IRL-Antenna shows a total cost of €9,999,687.50, a start of 1 April 2026 and an end of 31 March 2029, coordinated from the University of Galway with UCD. The national description, on ICHEC’s announcement and aifactory.ie, is €10 million, split evenly between EuroHPC and the Department, led by ICHEC with CeADAR, linking Ireland to the French AI Factory and to Luxembourg’s MeluXina-AI. It was launched in Dublin on 1 July 2026. An antenna helps Irish users reach machines that exist elsewhere. It does not put those machines in Galway.

A second €10 million is easy to merge with the first. On 30 July 2026 the Minister said Ireland would partner with France and had pledged €10 million to buy compute access time from a French AI Gigafactory, subject to the success of the French bid. That pledge is conditional. It is not the Antenna’s budget, and it is not spent compute.

Commercial GPU capacity that is actually described in public is small relative to the rhetoric. In December 2025 Data Centre Dynamics reported that CloudCIX and AlloComp had deployed a liquid-cooled NVIDIA HGX system using Blackwell B200 chips at a Cork data centre, described as eight B200 chips. Silicon Republic’s January 2026 report of the “Boole Supercomputer” repeats the companies’ claim that it is one of the first liquid-cooled B200 deployments in Europe and the first in Ireland. Eight B200s is one HGX node on that description. No independent FLOPS figure, and no statement that researchers can apply as they can to ICHEC, was in those reports. No Microsoft, Google or Amazon disclosure of GPU counts inside Irish data centres was found. A 2024 Register report said customers believed GPU instances in AWS’s Dublin region were constrained by power. AWS did not confirm that.

Data-centre electricity is the large Irish number. The CSO’s Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025 release says data centres used 7,663 gigawatt hours in 2025, 23% of metered electricity. The series in that release runs from 5% in 2015 (1,240 GWh) through 21% in 2023, 22% in 2024 and 23% in 2025. Total metered electricity in 2025 was 32,986 GWh. Urban dwellings were 18%. The CSO identifies data centres by name search, industry reports and inspection of large customers, because they are not a separate statistical class. The series includes cloud, enterprise and network data centres. It does not say what share is GPU training.

On 12 December 2025 the Commission for Regulation of Utilities decided that new data centres must provide generation or storage matching their maximum import demand, and must meet at least 80% of annual demand with additional renewable projects in Ireland, with a six-year glide path. Projects already supported by existing renewable schemes do not count. The decision supersedes the 2021 direction associated with the earlier connection pause. The CRU’s decision page quotes an EirGrid forecast in which data-centre demand would be 31% of national electricity demand in 2034. That 31% is a forecast. The CSO’s 7.663 TWh for 2025 and the CRU’s cited 9.4 TWh forecast for the same year are different boundaries. NESC, in the April 2026 report, says public information on AI-specific energy use is incomplete, and summarises a January 2026 Large Energy User Action Plan as the government’s attempt at a plan-led approach. Intelligence:Applied lists that action plan as one of its 35 items.

The policy fact is that new connections are now conditional. The statistical fact is that the demand already connected is almost a quarter of metered electricity and is still rising. Neither fact is a measurement of model training.

European AI firms in Ireland

Ireland’s AI industry, on the documents, has three layers. They are often described as one. The directory above is the short version. The paragraphs under it are the limits on what each name is allowed to mean.

European offices of companies that build models

OpenAI has its EU headquarters in Dublin. IDA Ireland’s 12 October 2026 release says the company employed over 120 people there and was announcing 200 further roles and an Applied AI Lab, taking announced commitments to at least 450. The 450 figure is a commitment of roles, not people already hired. The roles named are forward-deployed engineers, solutions engineers, privacy engineers, and go-to-market and user operations. That is applied deployment work. RTÉ, reporting the Irish unit’s 2025 accounts on 6 November 2026, said the statutory employee count for 2025 was 40, with employment since reported at 120, and cash funds of €164 million. The accounts figure and the later news figure are both real, and they are not the same date. The company said it would occupy the Tropical Fruit Warehouse from December 2026, so that move was still ahead when RTÉ wrote.

Anthropic opened a Dublin office in 2024, which RTÉ and The Irish Times describe as its European headquarters. On 13 March 2026 it announced 200 further jobs by 2027 in engineering, sales, finance, legal, compliance and operations. The jobs are announced, not filled. Anthropic’s own pages of 8 April 2025 and 7 November 2025 treat Dublin as an existing commercial office and single out Zurich, not Dublin, as the research-focused office. An EMEA headquarters and a research lab are different claims. The sources support the first.

Multinational engineering, trust and research that predates the chatbot boom

Microsoft Ireland is the EMEA headquarters. A Taoiseach’s speech and an IDA citation on 3 March 2025 put employment at more than 4,000, covering software development, engineering, data centres, finance, operations, and EMEA sales and marketing. In November 2024 Microsoft announced 550 additional Irish engineering and R&D roles over three to four years, in Azure, Copilot, customer-success engineering and cybersecurity. The Irish Times report the same day is the independent account. Announced roles are not a statement that 550 people were already hired. Microsoft’s own 2024 release said that, with those roles and LinkedIn, employment would exceed 6,000. That projected combined figure is not the March 2025 “more than 4,000”.

Google describes Dublin as its EMEA headquarters and a European data-centre hub. Its commissioned Ireland economic-impact report puts employment above 6,000 in 2026, with over 850 people on activities the company classes as R&D, and names the Google Safety Engineering Centre in Dublin as its European trust-and-safety hub. The GDP and “supported jobs” multipliers in that report are model outputs, not a CSO count. The 850 figure is the company’s classification of its own staff.

Meta’s international headquarters is the Ballsbridge campus. At the October 2023 opening Meta said it had over 2,000 full-time employees in Ireland, a data centre in Meath, and Reality Labs in Cork. Silicon Republic reported the same opening. That is a 2023 company headcount. Reality Labs is an AR and VR research site in Meta’s description. It is not evidence of a language-model laboratory. No 2026 headcount was verified here.

IBM Research says its Dublin lab, founded in 2011, is its only research lab in the EU and works on AI, security, hybrid cloud and quantum, with more than 80 researchers. That is the one multinational page in this set that clearly describes a research laboratory rather than an EMEA commercial headquarters. In May 2024 IBM announced up to 800 roles over three years in Dublin, Cork and at Red Hat in Waterford, in R&D plus digital sales and consulting, including work on foundation models. Reuters reported IBM then had about 3,000 staff in Ireland. Neither source says how many of the 800 were in post by November 2026. The Waterford portion of that announcement is a Red Hat site, not a university lab.

Amazon Web Services says the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region, launched in 2007, has three Availability Zones and is used to deliver cloud and AI services. That is a region and a set of data centres. It is not, on the company page, a research laboratory. Accenture describes The Dock at Grand Canal Dock as an R&D and innovation centre working on AI in its Ireland hiring copy. That description is a job advertisement. No independent 2025 or 2026 headcount for The Dock was found. Apple’s Irish operations and Intel’s Irish manufacturing were not established, in the 2025–26 sources read for this report, as AI research labs.

Indigenous product companies

The indigenous layer that can be checked in public documents is applied, and several of the best-known names have already been bought.

Fin, formerly Intercom, is an Irish-founded customer-service AI company. The Irish Times reported in June 2026 that Salesforce had agreed to buy it for about $3.6 billion. Salesforce said the acquisition closed on 10 September 2026. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and keeps a large Dublin presence. The product is a customer-service agent. Resolution-rate language in the acquirer’s release is marketing.

Nuritas, in Dublin, uses machine learning to search natural sources for bioactive peptides, as a 2019 Irish Times profile described. IVCA listed a €42 million round among the largest Irish deals of late 2024 and described Nuritas as an AI company. The product description in the press is older than the round. The round is the recent documented fact.

EdgeTier, in Dublin, sells an AI platform that reads contact-centre conversations. Claret Capital announced a growth investment on 18 August 2026. Employee counts and client names in that announcement are the investor’s claims. The round size was not stated there.

Manna is an Irish drone-delivery company. IVCA recorded a €43 million round in the second quarter of 2026, in the first-half survey. A March Irish Times report of a larger round still being assembled should not be preferred to the later published equity figure. IVCA does not classify that round inside its AI-and-machine-learning sector line. Manna is an autonomy and logistics company. Anthropic has named it, with others, as an Irish user of Claude, in the Irish Times account of the March 2026 jobs announcement. That is the vendor’s account.

SoapBox Labs, founded in Dublin by Patricia Scanlon, built speech recognition for children’s reading. RTÉ reported on 29 November 2023 that Curriculum Associates had bought it and that the Dublin team would continue as an innovation hub. No 2025 or 2026 source was found on whether that plan still holds. The price was not disclosed.

Aylien was a Dublin natural-language company. Quantexa said in February 2023 that it had bought Aylien and would keep investing in the Dublin NLP group. The headcount in that release is a 2023 claim. It is not a 2026 census.

Enterprise Ireland’s CeADAR page says the centre has more than 90 member companies. That is the centre’s figure for members of an applied hub, not a census of Irish AI startups.

Leemer Group is the publisher of this report. It is an independent group in Waterford. Leemer Labs is its research lab. Critique.sh, Leemer Chat, DáilDex and Square Pigeons are its products. Nothing in the IVCA, PitchBook, IDA or Research Ireland pages read for this report ranks the group, funds it, or counts it inside those totals. A publisher does not become a market statistic by writing about the market.

The pattern across the three layers is consistent. Ireland hosts the European commercial and infrastructure operations of several of the largest AI companies, and by 2026 the EU offices of OpenAI and Anthropic. The documented research laboratories are narrower: IBM Research Dublin, Microsoft’s announced engineering build-out, Google’s own account of R&D and trust-and-safety work, the university centres, and Rinn AI. Indigenous strength that can be checked sits in applied centres and product companies, several of which have been acquired. A national frontier-model champion is not what the documents show.

Irish, the public service, and civic data

The language

Irish is a lesser-resourced language in the technical sense, and the state’s own plan says so. The Digital Plan for the Irish Language, for speech and language technologies from 2023 to 2027, was launched on 8 December 2022. The government said it would invest €1 million in 2023 for the first research steps, with technology to be made available on a free licence. That million is a first-year figure, not the cost of the whole plan. The plan was prepared for the Department by ADAPT at DCU and the Phonetics and Speech Laboratory at Trinity, and it is tied to the 20-Year Strategy for the Irish Language and the Official Languages Act.

The plan records the data gap in numbers that should discipline anyone announcing an “Irish LLM”. It describes a 30-million-word written corpus designed to be balanced, a gold-standard part-of-speech set of 3,000 sentences, more than 100 million words of web-crawled text, a legislation parallel corpus of about 26 million Irish words and 24.5 million English words, and EduGA, 7.5 million words of educational material. It also says Irish morphology is rich, letter-to-sound rules differ by dialect, semantics are thinly documented, and the three main dialects each need their own mapping. Web-crawled Irish is noisy and often mixed with English. Token counts of raw text are not gold training tokens.

The usable treebank is still small. Universal Dependencies Irish-IDT contains 4,910 sentences and 115,990 tokens. A treebank of that size can train a parser. It cannot train a modern language model. Peer-reviewed machine-translation work says the same thing in a narrower domain. Lankford, Afli, Ní Loinsigh and Way, in the LREC 2022 paper on the gaHealth English–Irish health corpus, report that an in-domain corpus improved BLEU by up to 22.2 points against the best LoResMT 2021 systems. That is a gain on health text against a 2021 shared-task baseline. It is not a claim that general Irish machine translation matches high-resource pairs. BLEU is an automatic metric.

GaelTech, at DCU and ADAPT, has worked on Irish natural language processing since 2017, including multiword expressions for machine translation and Irish on social media. In October 2021 the Department funded GaelTech and the National Relay Station with over €350,000 for two further years. The sum is not split between the two projects, and that extension is not evidence of a current national data service in 2026. ABAIR, at Trinity, develops speech synthesis for the three major dialects, with the public system at abair.ie. By the December 2022 launch the Department said Trinity had a beta recogniser that could turn spoken Irish sentences into text. “Beta” in 2022 is not a published word-error rate. No official 2025 or 2026 evaluation of Irish speech-recognition accuracy was found. Dialect, children’s speech, disordered speech, and code-switching with English remain the hard cases the plan itself lists. Gaois, at DCU, builds terminology and corpus infrastructure, including the National Corpus of Irish. The university’s description does not publish model scores.

Údarás na Gaeltachta’s March 2026 report, AI na Gaeilge, says Irish is still little integrated into AI-enabled public services. It names scarce data, dialect variation and limited vendor support, and it says public bodies struggle to justify Irish-language AI when most services are still delivered in English. That is a gap analysis, not a finding that no Irish-language tools exist. Intelligence:Applied’s Tobar commitment is the government’s 2026 answer to the same gap: a state dataset, with Irish-language public services and culturally capable models aimed at 2030. Between a 2022 plan, a 2026 gap analysis and a 2030 target, the present tense is still “scarce gold data”.

Leemer Labs’ Irish-language work is a research programme. The public page describes plans to work with speakers and institutions. It should not be read as a claim that a production model has shipped. Fluent-speaker evaluation is the standard the group states for that work, which is the same standard the research literature keeps failing to replace with a single automatic score.

The public service

Public servants have had guidance for longer than they have had a shared system. Interim guidelines for the use of AI were published on 9 January 2024. Guidelines for the Responsible Use of AI in the Public Service followed on 7 May 2025, updated on 31 October 2025. They are meant to let public servants use AI with a human in the process. They do not list live departmental systems or a permitted-tools catalogue.

The National Cyber Security Centre’s June 2023 guidance, which had recommended that access to public generative-AI tools be restricted by default and that classified or personal information not be entered into public models, is marked deprecated as of an update dated 30 July 2026 on the NCSC guidance index. The NCSC points readers to a 2026 guideline on securing AI adoption. The detailed controls of that replacement were not restated here.

The Office of Government Procurement opened a preliminary market consultation on AI systems, governance and training on 17 February 2026. It was not a competition. Intelligence:Applied says a decision on the feasibility of a central public-sector AI procurement arrangement is due by the end of 2026. That decision had not arrived on 11 November. The Office of the Government Chief Information Officer’s role description says it provides an analytics and AI centre of excellence and an AI Advisory Unit. The page does not give the unit a headcount or a list of systems in production.

Named public-sector uses in the October programme are mostly still ahead. A shared “generic AI capability” for public bodies is described for 2027. A Social Protection Innovation Hub is piloting intelligent document processing and an eligibility chat inside a staff sandbox, with public release in 2027 only after testing. Agriculture work includes a national fire-activity forecast and an exotic vector-borne disease model. Revenue’s customer-service expansion is described as keeping human review for complex queries. These are programme commitments. The release does not report accuracy or a completed independent evaluation.

Health has its own strategy. On 11 March 2026 the Minister for Health published AI for Care, for 2026 to 2030. The HSE’s own account says implementation already includes AI in medical imaging, a national AI-supported stroke decision tool, more than 30 AI-enabled innovation projects, staff training, and an AI and Automation Centre of Excellence. The HSE AI Implementation Framework, published in August 2026 and updated in October, is the operating guide for governance, the EU AI Act and staff capability. “Deployment” in a strategy is the HSE’s description of its programme. It is not a published clinical evaluation or a count of patients. A line in the Department’s release, that AI scribe tools can cut documentation time by up to 40%, is not sourced on the page to an Irish evaluation. It should not be reported as a measured result in the Irish health service.

Parliament’s data, and what is not an official assistant

The Houses of the Oireachtas publish debates, questions, bills and acts for reuse through data.oireachtas.ie, under the Oireachtas open-data licence. That is an official data publication. It is not an official AI assistant. No official Oireachtas generative-AI service was found.

DáilDex is an independent civic product from this group. It reuses that open data for representative pages, source-linked alerts and plain-English explanations. data.gov.ie lists it as a third-party showcase. A catalogue listing does not make it an Oireachtas service, and the official record remains the authority. The product’s own account of accuracy and usage is not an independent audit.

Media literacy is further along as a conversation than as a curriculum. Media Literacy Ireland’s conference on 26 November 2025 included a panel, with ADAPT, on AI literacy. Coimisiún na Meán publishes “Be AI Aware” guidance for teenagers, in English and Irish. Digital Ireland promises foundational digital skills and media literacy for every learner, and an SME literacy campaign. Those are deliverables to 2030.

Skills

The skills system now has a free front door, a set of higher-education places, and a projection of shortage that is about digital specialists rather than a headcount of “AI jobs”.

AIReady.ie, launched on 23 April 2026 by SOLAS with the National Skills Council, is a free national platform. The Minister said the initiative aims to upskill one million people. One million is an aim, not a completion count. The first courses are short, for older people, sole traders, farmers and people returning to work. The Department said each takes less than 30 minutes. SOLAS said under 20 minutes. Intelligence:Applied puts the next phase, aimed at employees using AI as a role-enhancement tool, inside the €150 million AI Future Skills programme, and says the AI Office will set up a National AI Literacy Taskforce to deliver a literacy framework before the end of 2027. An education strand says it will support more than 43,000 primary teachers and 17,000 post-primary students, with an ambition that by 2030 every student develops age-appropriate media, digital and AI literacy. The 17,000 figure is the group the new junior-cycle resources are said to support directly, not the national post-primary enrolment.

For 2026, a Dáil answer on 7 September says Springboard+ has €34.4 million from the National Training Fund and 7,274 places on 244 courses. Courses are free for unemployed learners and people returning to work. Employed learners pay 10% at NFQ levels 7 to 9, and level 6 is free. An earlier answer, on 28 April 2026, says almost a quarter of the places are in digital skills, including 428 places in programmes the Minister classes as AI-focused. A 10 June 2026 answer says the March launch includes 15 AI courses. “AI-focused” is the Minister’s category. The answer does not list the titles. The same 7 September answer describes a separate micro-credential subsidy, 3,881 places with fees subsidised by 80% until December 2026. That count overlaps the Springboard picture. The two place counts should not be added unless a source says they are different people.

The 28 April 2026 answer says SOLAS has rolled out AI micro-qualifications at NFQ levels 4 to 6 through the 16 Education and Training Boards. A 13 May 2026 answer says those qualifications were launched in February. No place count or euro cost for them was stated. The 28 April answer also says it is not possible to isolate National Training Fund spending that is only for AI. The wider figures in that answer — about €564 million from the fund in 2026 for in-employment programmes, and a surplus to be drawn down over the years to 2030 — are not an AI budget.

On 28 September 2026 the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs published Skills for Digital Specialists to 2030. It estimates about 168,800 digital specialists employed in Ireland in 2025, baseline demand of about 215,400 by 2030, and annual shortages of about 5,500 by 2030, or above 7,700 in a high-growth scenario. Strongest demand is expected in AI and machine learning, cybersecurity, data, cloud and software engineering, with cybersecurity the fastest-growing domain. These are scenario projections for digital specialists. They are not a count of AI jobs, and they are not the same series as Eurostat’s 172,400 ICT specialists. The 2024 strategy refresh had called for an update of a 2022 AI-skills study. The press release does not say this 2026 report is that update.

Stanford’s 2025 AI Index chart of the relative AI hiring rate shows 24.58% for Ireland in 2024, inside that chart’s top 15. The metric is the year-over-year change in AI hiring divided by overall hiring. It is not a count of vacancies. An older claim that Ireland leads the world in AI job demand was not matched, in this research, to a primary ranking table that could be quoted.

A chronology of what changed

The last two years are easier to read as a sequence than as a mood.

• 11 June 2024.The Departments of Finance and Enterprise publish the exposure study: 63% of employment, with the method’s limits stated in the release.
• 8 August and 4 September 2024.The DPC’s Grok undertaking. Court proceedings struck out. No fine in those statements.
• 1 November 2024.Microsoft announces 550 Irish engineering and R&D roles.
• 6 November 2024.National AI Strategy Refresh.
• February 2025.The AI Advisory Council’s copyright and deepfake advice.
• 7 May 2025.Responsible-use guidelines for the public service.
• 11 April 2025 and 17 February 2026.Two separate DPC inquiries into X. Neither had a published final decision in the pages read here.
• 10 June 2025.CSO: data centres were 22% of metered electricity in 2024. The 2025 release later puts 2025 at 23%.
• 12 December 2025.The CRU’s large-energy-user decision. New data centres must bring renewable and dispatchable supply.
• 6 February 2026.CSO enterprise AI statistics: 20.2% overall, 17.2% of small firms, 57.7% of large firms.
• 8 February 2026.IVCA full-year 2025: €1.1 billion, of which AI and machine learning €104 million.
• 18 February 2026.Digital Ireland, 90 deliverables. The executive summary carries the same deliverables.
• 11 March 2026.AI for Care, the national health and social-care strategy.
• 13 March 2026.Anthropic announces 200 Dublin jobs by 2027.
• 27 March 2026.CASPIr procurement opens. The machine is not delivered.
• 1 April 2026.The AI Factory Antenna’s CORDIS start date. Launched in Dublin on 1 July.
• 14 April 2026.Walton AI Facility, €1,034,261, in Waterford.
• 23 April 2026.AIReady.ie launches, with an aim of one million people.
• 29 April 2026.NESC on skills, shadow AI, energy and public legitimacy.
• 10 June 2026.Rinn centres, including €121,752,497 for Rinn AI, starting 1 July.
• 21 July 2026.The Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Act 2026. The AI Office of Ireland is established on 31 July. The Department’s establishment notice names the chief executive. This report does not treat that appointment as a statement of the Office’s budget or powers.
• 10 September 2026.Salesforce says the acquisition of Fin has closed.
• 28 September 2026.EGFSN digital-specialist projections to 2030.
• 12 October 2026.OpenAI’s further 200 Dublin roles and Applied AI Lab. Enterprise Ireland publishes the PitchBook AI-deal totals the same day.
• 13 and 14 October 2026.Intelligence:Applied and a Cabinet Committee on AI. The International AI Summit and the Dublin Declaration follow on 14 October.
• 20 October 2026.The Minister describes the widened, renamed Local Enterprise Office AI voucher, without a new euro cap.
• 6 November 2026.RTÉ reports OpenAI Ireland’s 2025 accounts.

What a builder in Ireland can take from this

The documents support a working picture, and they refuse a slogan.

Ireland is a strong place to deploy AI and a hard place to pretend you are training a frontier model on national infrastructure. The adoption rate that matches a typical Irish company is the CSO’s small-firm figure, about 17%, not the telemetry figure of 44.6% and not the large-firm figure of 58%. The skills complaint from employers and the shadow-use finding from NESC describe the same gap: people are already using tools, and most organisations have not built the evaluation, the data boundary, or the training to match.

The funding that fits a first project is still small and specific. Digital Discovery pays for a short expert engagement, up to €5,000. The Local Enterprise Office voucher pays for software, up to €5,000, and its AI widening had not, in the October Dáil answer, raised that cap or removed the exclusion of bespoke software. Digital Process Innovation and the DTIF are for larger, risk-bearing work, with their own eligibility. A startup that needs a million euros is in the venture market, which slowed in 2025, or in a collaborative DTIF bid with a university and at least two other partners. Those are different conversations.

The research partner for a company is more likely to be CeADAR, a technology centre, or a Rinn collaboration than a rack of public GPUs. CASPIr, when it arrives, is specified for small-scale training and inference inside scientific workflows. Large-scale training is a EuroHPC AI Factory conversation, reached from Ireland through the Antenna, not a Waterford or Galway machine that exists today. The Walton cluster is a welcome piece of south-eastern infrastructure at a million euros. It does not change that sentence.

The legal sequence is also usable. If you are training on personal data, the DPC’s 2024 guidance and the 2024–2026 record with X, Meta and LinkedIn are the Irish facts, and they are GDPR facts. If you are placing a high-risk system on the market, the dates are December 2027 and August 2028, and the Irish authority depends on the sector. If you are marking synthetic content, the grace period the Council describes runs to 2 December 2026. The AI Office of Ireland coordinates. It does not replace the DPC, the Central Bank, the HSE, the Workplace Relations Commission or the CCPC.

The language work is the clearest long gap. Gold Irish data is measured in thousands of sentences, not in the hundreds of billions of tokens that train a frontier model. Dialect, code-switching and the absence of a published national speech-recognition evaluation are the technical facts. Tobar is a 2030-shaped answer. A product that claims fluent Irish in 2026 owes its users an evaluation by fluent speakers and a straight account of which dialect and which domain it covers. That is also the standard in the state’s own digital plan.

For public-interest work, the asset that already exists is open data. The Oireachtas API is real. An assistant built on it is only as good as its links back to the record. Health, social protection and agriculture are where the state has now named pilots. They are pilots and strategies until an evaluation is published.

Leemer Group’s work sits in that picture as a builder’s work, from Waterford, not as a line in the national statistics. We build AI systems for a defined job, evaluate models before a client relies on them, and do readiness work that separates a process worth automating from one that is not. Irish-language AI is a research and product programme with fluent-speaker evaluation. DáilDex is the civic product on the Oireachtas record. Square Pigeons is the studio for software that is not only a model. None of that makes us an approved grant provider, a notified body, or a substitute for the AI Office. If you want a written scope before you talk to Enterprise Ireland or your Local Enterprise Office, that is a useful use of an engineering firm. The agency still decides.

What this report will not say

A long report can still launder a false precision. These are the claims the sources do not support, included so they are not inferred from the paragraphs above.

• The 2021 strategy was not repealed, and there is no public audit that every 2021 action is complete.
• Digital Ireland has no single published euro cost.
• High-risk AI Act duties are not enforceable in Ireland in November 2026.
• The AI Office is not the only Irish AI regulator, and this report does not give it a budget, a headcount, or an open sandbox.
• The Grow Digital cap was not published as having risen above €5,000 in October 2026.
• Digital Discovery is not a software-purchase grant.
• Nearly half of all Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund money is not a figure that survives the later project totals. The “nearly half” sentence belonged to an older total.
• Research Ireland’s older stock of active awards is not an AI-only budget, and centre-website projections of jobs and economic impact from Rinn are not in the 10 June announcement.
• The Antenna’s €10 million and the conditional Gigafactory €10 million are different sums. CASPIr’s €25 million and the Department’s €20 million are an unresolved conflict. CASPIr is not an AI factory and will not, on ICHEC’s own description, train large models.
• Kay is not the current national service.
• Data-centre electricity is not AI electricity. Twenty-three per cent of metered demand in 2025 is all identified data centres.
• The DPC did not, in the statements cited, fine X over Grok training, and it did not approve Meta’s or LinkedIn’s training. LinkedIn’s statement says the opposite of approval.
• One million people have not completed AIReady.ie.
• IVCA’s €104 million and PitchBook’s €691 million are not two measurements of one pot.
• OpenAI’s Dublin Applied AI Lab and Anthropic’s Dublin office are not, on the companies’ own descriptions, frontier research labs. Anthropic reserves that description for Zurich.
• Salesforce’s purchase of Fin, and the earlier purchases of SoapBox Labs and Aylien, are not evidence that an indigenous foundation-model company remains independent. They are evidence of applied products finding buyers.
• DáilDex is not an Oireachtas service.
• This report is not a ranking of Leemer Group, and it is not a forecast of Irish employment in 2030. The EGFSN figures are scenarios for digital specialists. The exposure study is not a redundancy forecast.

Sources

Every external page cited above is listed once. The link text is the name used in the report. Internal Leemer Group pages are not repeated here.

• Information Society Statistics — Enterprises 2025
• The use of artificial intelligence technologies in the European Union
• Business in Ireland 2025
• 11 December 2025 Eurostat release
• Eurostat statistics article
• Stanford AI Index Report 2026
• Economy chapter
• Measuring AI Diffusion
• ICT specialists in employment
• State of the Digital Decade
• Skills for the digital age
• productivity and AI
• Work just got smarter
• Artificial Intelligence in Service of Society
• NESC accessible text
• Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe
• 2024 Work Trend Index
• 2025 release
• global 2024 Work Trend Index
• AI – Here for Good
• 8 July 2021
• progress report
• National AI Strategy Refresh 2024
• 18 February 2026
• 13 and 14 October 2026
• May 2025 Dáil answer
• timeline
• Dublin Declaration on Trusted, Safe and Sovereign Artificial Intelligence
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1689
• AI Act page
• Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Act 2026
• S.I. No. 404/2026
• S.I. No. 403/2026
• description of the Office
• Section 42
• S.I. No. 366/2025
• S.I. No. 405/2026
• AI Act page
• told the Dáil
• guidance for organisations using AI and large language models
• agreed to suspend
• proceedings were struck out
• opened an inquiry
• opened a separate inquiry
• statement on Meta
• statement on LinkedIn
• Responsible Artificial Intelligence Innovation
• PDF
• The Impact of AI on Ireland’s Creative Sector
• What AI and digital supports are available to me
• 2026 brochure
• Local Enterprise Office brochure
• Grow Digital page
• brochure
• National Enterprise Hub
• 20 October 2026
• Dáil answer of 28 May 2025
• programme page
• Disruptive Technologies Innovation Fund
• 18 February 2025 Dáil answer
• applicant guide
• RD&I guidelines
• incentives page
• 2026 training-grant guide
• €1.48 billion
• 8 February 2026
• first-half survey
• first quarter
• Enterprise Ireland
• invested €32.9 million in 198 startups
• 2026 funding review
• €460 million of public research investment over eight years
• Insight
• governance page
• 2019 economic-impact claim
• ADAPT
• 1 February 2021 release
• CHIST-ERA funding
• centre’s own description
• CeADAR
• digital and AI strategy page
• CeADAR
• NovaUCD
• CRT-AI
• centre page
• 11 June 2026
• Walton AI Facility
• SETU’s own news
• published AI work
• hardware page
• interim-service notice
• university
• ICHEC
• launched the procurement
• ICHEC
• Department’s release
• AIF IRL-Antenna
• ICHEC’s announcement
• aifactory.ie
• 30 July 2026
• Data Centre Dynamics
• Silicon Republic’s January 2026 report
• 2024 Register report
• Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025
• decided
• 12 December 2025
• 12 October 2026 release
• 6 November 2026
• 200 further jobs by 2027
• The Irish Times
• 8 April 2025
• 7 November 2025
• Taoiseach’s speech
• IDA citation
• announced 550 additional Irish engineering and R&D roles
• Irish Times report
• Ireland economic-impact report
• October 2023 opening
• Silicon Republic
• IBM Research
• announced up to 800 roles
• Reuters
• Amazon Web Services
• Ireland hiring copy
• The Irish Times
• closed on 10 September 2026
• 2019 Irish Times profile
• Claret Capital
• March Irish Times report
• RTÉ
• Quantexa
• Enterprise Ireland’s CeADAR page
• Digital Plan for the Irish Language
• 8 December 2022
• Irish-IDT
• gaHealth English–Irish health corpus
• GaelTech
• over €350,000
• ABAIR
• abair.ie
• Gaois
• AI na Gaeilge
• Interim guidelines for the use of AI
• Guidelines for the Responsible Use of AI in the Public Service
• June 2023 guidance
• NCSC guidance index
• preliminary market consultation
• Office of the Government Chief Information Officer’s role description
• 11 March 2026
• HSE’s own account
• HSE AI Implementation Framework
• data.oireachtas.ie
• DáilDex
• data.gov.ie
• Media Literacy Ireland’s conference
• “Be AI Aware” guidance
• 23 April 2026
• SOLAS
• Dáil answer on 7 September
• 28 April 2026 answer
• 10 June 2026 answer
• 13 May 2026 answer
• Skills for Digital Specialists to 2030
• 2025 AI Index
• 10 June 2025
• executive summary
• establishment notice
• International AI Summit

How this was checked

The report was written on 11 November 2026. The Research Ireland Rinn announcement of 10 June 2026 and the Department of the Taoiseach’s Intelligence:Applied release of 13 October 2026 were read directly that day. Every other figure is taken from the page linked beside it. The Sources list repeats each external page once. Those pages are statute and statutory instruments on the Irish Statute Book and EUR-Lex, CSO and Eurostat releases, Dáil answers, DPC statements, IVCA survey notes, EuroHPC and ICHEC notices, and the university, agency and company pages named in the text. The same list is published in the article’s citation metadata.

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