Full coverage: Europe

Two months into her new job as European Commissioner for Financial Services, Mairéad McGuinness is facing into a potential wave of debt defaults. She wants to see a more sensitive response than the past wholesale offloading of non-performing loans to overseas vulture funds.

Corporate lenders and borrowers are used to British law and the closest alternative from next year will be Irish law. Deal or no deal, we already know some niche markets are ripe for this opportunity.

Last month, the Minister for Agriculture was burning the midnight oil in EU talks worth €10bn to Ireland. Next month, his industry is facing Brexit chaos. Yet Charlie McConalogue is at his most combative when discussing the lack of transparency in the beef trade.

With Phil Hogan gone, the focus now turns to the position he has vacated. Here is why the trade commissioner job matters, and why an Irish candidate is likely to replace Hogan.

Foreign exchange markets are notoriously unpredictable. But it now seems certain the Euro will be significantly stronger relative to the dollar at the end of this decade than it is today.

Judges in Luxembourg have found that the European Commission failed to prove Irish tax deals with Apple were illegal. The main reason? Investigators didn’t go far enough in their probing of the Revenue’s “incomplete and occasionally inconsistent” rulings.

Irish businessman Barry Conlon believes his Texas-based company Overhaul could revolutionise supply chain management. Investors agree and have just cut a cheque for $17.5m. He now plans to scale the business across Europe from its new European headquarters in Dundalk.

First elected to the Dáil at the age of 27, Lucinda Creighton was a rising star in Fine Gael – before she resigned from the party over her stance on abortion. Having left Irish politics for good, Creighton has entered the world of business through Vulcan Consulting.