Ireland's finance minister sought to raise over 800 million euros (714.89 million pounds) in extra revenue in a budget on Tuesday to give taxpayers a "modest" break and help tackle a housing crisis. He also sought to balance the state's books for the first time in a decade. Ireland started reversing years of savage spending cuts and tax hikes in 2014 - about the time its economy began to rebound sharply from a deep financial crisis, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Ryanair Holdings Plc sought to contain the damage caused by scrapping hundreds of flights through the end of October, promising to compensate affected passengers and apologizing for the mismanagement that led to a shortage of available crews, Bloomberg News reported. With mass cancellations set to leave about 400,000 passengers in the lurch, Europe’s biggest discount airline is likely to take a 25 million-euro ($30 million) profit hit from refunds and compensation, the Dublin-based company said Monday, three days after announcing the surprise cutbacks that started on Saturday.

Ryanair will bid to operate 90 planes under the Alitalia brand and using existing staff as part of the Italian airline’s restructuring, Chief Executive Michael O’Leary said on Thursday. Ryanair has until Oct. 2 to make a binding bid for all or part of the Italian carrier, which has been put under special administration for the second time in less than a decade, Reuters reported. “We will be submitting an offer for the 90 jet aircraft, with their pilots, cabin crew, routes etc,” O’Leary told journalists at a press briefing in London.

Ryanair will not bid for any assets of insolvent German airline Air Berlin, its Chief Executive Michael O’Leary said on Wednesday, describing the process as “a stitch-up”. Air Berlin, Germany’s second-largest airline, filed for bankruptcy protection this month after shareholder Etihad Airways withdrew funding following years of losses. O’Leary, the head of the Irish budget airline, has complained that the insolvency process was designed to help strengthen leading German airline Lufthansa, Reuters reported.

In a related story, Bloomberg News reported that Ryanair Holdings Plc said it’s “genuinely interested” in bidding for insolvent Air Berlin Plc and called on the German company to involve it in the sale process. Ryanair could buy all or part of Air Berlin but has so far been ignored by the ailing carrier, according to Chief Executive Officer Michael O’Leary, who said Wednesday he’s concerned the company will be handed to Deutsche Lufthansa AG in an anti-competitive, all-German deal.

A Russian lender that provided banking services to a subsidiary of State-controlled Irish Bank Resolution Corporation has been shut down by regulators there due to its “highly-risky credit policy”, the Irish Times reported. Until earlier this week, the website of the IBRC’s Moscow subsidiary, LLC Solids, listed Sovereign Bank as its “partner bank” in Russia. However, in April 2016 the bank had its licence revoked by the Russian Central Bank due to “the real threat to the interests of creditors and depositors”.

Irish banks are set to face mounting pressure from regulators to write off bad loans, a person familiar with the matter said. European authorities that now oversee the biggest Irish lenders have consistently pushed bankers to deal with the legacy of non-performing assets left over from the nation’s financial crash through measures such as loan sales, Bloomberg News reported.

Ireland’s central bank has increased its economic growth forecasts by almost a third, as growing strength in the rest of the eurozone helps to offset its expectations of a negative impact from Brexit, the Financial Times reported. In a quarterly update released on Friday, the Central Bank of Ireland said it now expects gross domestic product to increase by 4.5 per cent this year, compared to previous estimates of 3.5 per cent. Growth is expected to slow to 3.6 per cent in 2018, but that is still better than its earlier prediction of 3.2 per cent growth.

Permanent TSB shares plunged as much as 16 per cent on Wednesday as investors worried about the bank’s plan to resort to loan sales and repossessions to resolve its worst €2.68 billion of mortgages, which will also delay a return to dividends. The 75 per cent State-owned lender reported that its net profit shrank 55 per cent to €36 million in the first half from the year-earlier period, as it took a €6 million charge against bad loans, the Irish Times reported.

The Irish economy is about a third smaller than expected. The country’s current account surplus is actually a deficit, the Financial Times reported. And its debt level is at least a quarter higher than taxpayers have been led to believe. These are some of the startling results thrown up by a new measure of Irish economic activity adopted by Ireland’s official statisticians. The measure, known as “modified gross national income” and presented as GNI*, is an attempt to de-globalise one of the world’s most open economies.