Not everyone had a terrible 2022 – not in comparison to its two immediate predecessors anyway – but let’s start, as is tradition, with those for whom the year could have been better.
For an Irish tech start-up like Wayflyer, the correction wiped the gloss off a shiny start to the year. In February, a funding round took its valuation to $1.6 billion, making it Ireland’s newest unicorn, and it announced plans to expand its global workforce from 250 people to 600 by the end of the year.
But if tech winter proved an unsettling stifler of ambition, actual winter was dismal for thousands of small businesses – including cafes, restaurants and shops – struggling with labour shortages, inflation in ingredient costs and, the final straw for some, surging energy bills. But even without unplanned ornithological interventions, air travel was a bumpy affair for many people in 2022. By June it was apparent that while we were ready to travel again, Dublin Airport and a certain airline – Aer Lingus – wasn’t ready for us to travel, and not just because they seemed to be constantly running out of toilet roll and Pringles respectively.
Planes were involved in another sort of drama this year. That’s not a great sentence to hear in any context, but add the words “illegal war” and you get a sense of the stakes. Meanwhile, Ukraine, entering winter with a severely damaged energy infrastructure and several cities reduced to rubble, continues to endure the brutal misery of Russian bombs.
While there have been less nightmarish years to be in charge of an economy, the year was not without its triumphs for Donohoe, who was re-elected as president of the Eurogroup – the informal collective for euro zone finance ministers – despite his move out of the finance job. Also making a point of determining her own exit route this year was head of Twitter Ireland Sinéad McSweeney, the social media company’s vice-president of global public policy and philanthropy and a woman who knows her way around the Irish legal system.
Other deals this year included Glen Dimplex’s sale of its Morphy Richards home appliances brand to Chinese group Guangdong Xinbao Electrical Appliance Holdings for a reported €175 million-€200 million. The transaction represented “a remarkable milestone in value creation”, according to Fergal Leamy, chief executive of the Naughton family-owned electrical group. It also capped his first year in the CEO job.
Begrudgers will be pleased.