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By Dan Walsh

The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, James Browne TD, today announced funding for key infrastructure projects under the Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund (HIIF) Call 1. 

Five major infrastructure projects across Wexford are to receive funding under the HIIF. The purpose of the HIIF is to support direct investment in infrastructure required to unlock the development of housing in towns and cities nationwide.

Wexford County Council welcomes confirmation of the funding for projects under the HIIF, a significant investment that will help unlock the delivery of new housing and support sustainable development across the county. 

The breakdown of the funding that will be used to deliver critical infrastructure works are as follows:  

Turret Rocks, Enniscorthy – link road from Esmonde Road to Spring Valley Junction, including junction and drainage works. Indicative costs band <€10 million. 

Milehouse to Moyne, Enniscorthy – link road from Milehouse to Quarry Park and upgrade of pedestrian linkage in Greenville and Cherryorchard/Caim. Indicative costs band > €20 million. 

Ballynagee, Wexford Town – Link Road from Ballynagee/Scholars Way roundabout and extending north to Starvehall, Whiterock Hill. Indicative cost band <€10 million.  

St. Waleran’s Strategic Transport Link, Gorey – Link Road through St. Waleran’s to include a combined rail and road overbridge and new junction. Indicative costs band €10-20 million.  

Ballytegan, Gorey – Footpath works at Arklow Road Junction to St. Walerans and St. Walerans to The Rock GAA entrance. Indicative cost band <€10 million. 

These essential enabling works are expected to directly fast-track the development of approximately 5,300 new homes and support the continued growth of the areas. These works are also expected to indirectly facilitate the development of a further 5,900 units approximately supporting over 11,000 homes. 

Chief Executive of Wexford County Council, Eddie Taaffe said; “This funding represents a major investment in the future of our county. By delivering the infrastructure needed to support new housing developments, Wexford County Council can help meet growing demand for homes while creating vibrant and sustainable communities for current and future residents”. 

Cathaoirleach of Wexford County Council, Cllr. Joe Sullivan added; “The Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund plays a vital role in addressing infrastructure constraints that can delay housing delivery. This investment will enable the Council to progress key infrastructure projects that will unlock housing opportunities and support sustainable development”. 

The projects align with Wexford County Council’s strategic objectives to increase housing supply, promote sustainable growth, and enhance the quality of life for residents. The infrastructure works will also provide wider benefits for the local community, including increased connectivity, enhanced public services and increased capacity to support future development.  

Wexford County Council will now progress the detailed delivery phases of the projects through its new Housing Infrastructure Working Group which is a cross departmental team to accelerate delivery.

Wexford County Council acknowledges the support of Minister James Browne the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Housing Activation Office in securing this investment.  

Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris will both vote in favour of a Sinn Féin bill to remove the three-day waiting period for abortion services. The Dáil is set to debate a bill tabled by Sinn Féin on Tuesday evening that seeks to remove the three-day reflection period that a woman must wait between seeking an abortion from a doctor and accessing the service, the Irish Examiner reports. The move comes just weeks after the Government and Sinn Féin voted against a similar motion from the Social Democrats, citing concerns about aspects of the proposed legislation, including changes to when abortions would be permitted in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities. Responding to questions from Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald in the Dáil, the Taoiseach confirmed that he will vote in favour of the legislation and said further debate should take place at the Oireachtas health committee. Martin said he recognised that abortion was a “sensitive issue” and that there were “a range of opinions”. “The people did vote to repeal the 8th Amendment in 2018 and to provide free, safe and legal access to termination services,” the Taoiseach said. “I am aware of the arguments for and against the removal of the three-day waiting period. It is important we have a respectful debate in the house. “I intend to vote for this to go through to committee stage. At committee stage there will be, perhaps, a need for consequential amendments.”

By Dan Walsh

Infrastructure funding for St Waleran’s and Ballytegan Road announced today (Tuesday) will transform North Gorey and open up the entire area to exciting developments; that’s according to Fine Gael TD for Wicklow Wexford, Brian Brennan.

Welcoming the announcement of funding under the Housing Infrastructure Investment Fund (HIIF), Deputy Brennan said; “This is massive news for Gorey as funding has been granted for the delivery of the 1.4km link road through St. Waleran’s Demesne which will include a combined rail and road overbridge and a new junction; this road will be the catalyst to opening up the site and allowing for progress of the long awaited St Waleran’s Demesne Masterplan.

The scheme will connect the adjacent neighbourhoods of Creagh, Ballytegan, Clonattin and will directly unlock lands for 820 residential units and indirectly unlocks a further 1,428 residential units.

The funding also gives the green light for progress on the Sports & Community Hub, which will include outdoor fields for cricket and hockey, an athletics track, and looped walking paths in Phase 1 and will further deliver an indoor community sports building equipped for basketball and cycling in Phase 2.

In a further news, funding has also been announced for the delivery of a footpath from the Arklow Road Junction to St. Walerans (Northern Boundary) and St Walerans (Northern Boundary) to The Rock GAA Club entrance.

Deputy Brennan continued; “I am absolutely delighted to see funding for this infrastructure being delivered. The footpath with be transformative for the entire community providing accessible and safe access all the way from Gorey Town out to the Rock. 

“It will open up land for 600 residential units and indirectly unlocks potential for a further 1,750 residential units as Gorey continues to grow and thrive.

“I have been in regular contact with the communities seeking these infrastructural developments and have raised them both with senior officials in Wexford County Council and advocated for this funding with my colleagues in Government and I am delighted today to see this step forward.

“The St Waleran’s Project has been a long time in the pipeline; it was a plan that my predecessor in Gorey, Michael D’Arcy called for over many years so today is an extremely important step in making this vision become a reality.

“Gorey is one of the fastest growing towns in the country; it is important that we invest in the appropriate infrastructure to match that growth to ensure that the town continues to thrive,” concluded Deputy Brennan.

Running local models is good now I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now. I have a 2022 M2 Mac with 64 GB RAM and 1TB storage and I’ve used - Mistral 7B - Gemma 3 - OpenAI OSS-20B - Qwen 3 MOE, as well as a number of other Qwen variants like Qwen 2.5 Coder across a lot of different system setups like - raw llama.cpp with Open WebUI - llama-cpp-python - Ollama - llamafiles and - LM Studio Where are local models now? Early on, models were slow, hard to use, and just not that accurate for most programming tasks. The idea that local models were severely lagging behind was largely true until, for me, the release of GPT-OSS. I have no concrete scientific evidence of this - my own personal vibe metric of “is a model good enough” is, “do I have to double-check it against an API model”, and GPT-OSS was the first one where I started doing that a lot less often. As a result, I’ve mostly been using local models as fast, personalized Google for development questions that don’t require recency. But with the most recent releases from Google in the Gemma 4, family, I’ve finally been able to do agentic coding locally and have loops work at about ~75% the accuracy/speed of frontier models, which is incredible. I’ve so far been using gemma-4-26b-a4b LM Studio implementation as my default local model. I’ve used the local setup so far to: Refactor a Python script that was a notebook into a repo of 5-6 modules, lint that module to use correct type hints for generics (most frontier models now do this automatically, but not always). I’ve also used it to proofread some blog posts, write unit tests, and to bootstrap a repo that stands up a two-tower model for recommendations just to see what the agent would do with a blank slate. Here’s what it generated, which was pretty basic but still beyond the scope of anything I would have thought possible last year: Note that the environment is restricted because I run all my agentic workflows in a Docker container with limited access to execution. I’m also building an app that surfaces trending topics from Arxiv papers. Out of curiosity, I had Pi go through my past LM Studio session logs and figure out what I was using LM Studio for: Unsurprisingly, since I’ve been working on Rijksearch, None of these are groundbreaking tasks (again, a lot of personalized Google/docs lookups), and working on them does give my GPUs and RAM a workout and the K-V cache grows to 64 GB RAM. But, the larger story for me is that these kinds of tasks, even as simple as they are, used to be impossible for local models as recently as 6 months ago. Gemma-4-12b-qat just came out but I’ve already also really been impressed with its performance relative to its size. The model architecture itself is really interesting and proposes a bunch of interesting questions like, “if we are constrained by performance and price, what architectural tradeoffs do we need to make?” a question that so far has not really been asked in the mad token gold rush. Running agentic models locally today But don’t take my word for any of this, try it out for yourself! You’ll need a local model inference engine, an agentic harness, and the local model artifact if you want to try to run local agentic flows. You’ll need to set up the harness to point at your local inference endpoint, the downloaded model artifact served via the inference engine. For my local setup, I’m currently using Pi as the agent harness and LM Studio as the inference server, although it would likely be faster if I just used llama.cpp directly - a potential direction for a future experiment. This post was very easy to follow to set up agentic coding with Pi and LM Studio, although I did make a few tweaks to the post’s setup. - Model: The post recommends Gemma 26B A4B , butgemma-4-12b-qat is more recent and smaller and faster, without much sacrifice in accuracy. - Security: I run every Pi session in a Docker container and give it permissions only to bash so that it can’t run Python code or do web browsing, although I do plan to allow curl in a different image for some research work I’m doing. - Agent Harness Config: Since I run everything in Docker, I edited Pi’s models.json in order to get Pi to talk to the model. "lmstudio": { "baseUrl": "http://host.docker.internal:1234/v1", "api": "openai-completions", "apiKey": "not-needed", "models": [ { "id": "google/gemma-4-12b-qat", "input": [ "text", "image" ] } ] } Here’s my Docker Compose config: services: pi: build: context: . dockerfile: Dockerfile image: pi-agent:0.74.0 init: true stdin_open: true tty: true extra_hosts: - "host.docker.internal:host-gateway" environment: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY: ${ANTHROPIC_API_KEY:-} OPENAI_API_KEY: ${OPENAI_API_KEY:-not-needed} GEMINI_API_KEY: ${GEMINI_API_KEY:-} OPENAI_API_BASE: ${OPENAI_API_BASE:-http://host.docker.internal:1234/v1} # note that you'll need to specify a base if you also use OpenAI to access OpenAI's actual completions endpoint WHATEVER_API_KEY: ${WHATEVER_API_KEY:-} volumes: - ${HOME}/.pi/agent/models.json:/config/models.json - ${WORKSPACE:-.}:/workspace - pi-config:/config - pi-sessions:/sessions working_dir: /workspace volumes: pi-config: pi-sessions: and here’s the bash script that runs pi . #!/usr/bin/env bash # Pi — Start the containerized Pi agent. # Directory containing this script and the compose files. SCRIPT_DIR="$(cd -- "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" && pwd)" # Workspace to mount into the container. WORKSPACE_DIR="${WORKSPACE:-$(pwd)}" case "$WORKSPACE_DIR" in /*) ;; *) WORKSPACE_DIR="$(cd -- "$WORKSPACE_DIR" && pwd)" ;; esac export WORKSPACE="$WORKSPACE_DIR" sandbox="${PI_SANDBOX:-0}" pi_args=() while (($#)); do case "$1" in --sandbox) sandbox=1 ;; --no-sandbox) sandbox=0 ;; *) pi_args+=("$1") ;; esac shift done compose_files=( -f "$SCRIPT_DIR/docker-compose.yml" ) if [[ "$sandbox" == "1" ]]; then # an even more secure sandbox compose_files+=( -f "$SCRIPT_DIR/docker-compose.sandbox.yml" ) fi # Derive a container name from the workspace directory's basename. # Sanitize to characters Docker accepts: [a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9_.-]* repo_slug="$(basename -- "$WORKSPACE_DIR" | tr -c 'a-zA-Z0-9_.-' '-' | sed 's/^-*//')" [[ -z "$repo_slug" ]] && repo_slug="workspace" container_name="pi-${repo_slug}-$$" api_key_args=( -e OPENAI_API_KEY -e DEEPSEEK_API_KEY -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY -e GEMINI_API_KEY ) cmd=( docker compose --project-directory "$SCRIPT_DIR" "${compose_files[@]}" run --rm --name "$container_name" "${api_key_args[@]}" pi ) if ((${#pi_args[@]})); then cmd+=("${pi_args[@]}") fi exec "${cmd[@]}" I build the Docker container and make changes to the files in its own repo. Then, I run Pi in the repo I’m working in, which spins up Docker so that Pi can’t wipe files or directories by acting on my physical hard drive. This also enables Pi running in the container to see my custom model json config by shipping it into the container. All of this has been working fairly well for my experiments. There are still issues with local models: inference can be slow, context windows are small and limited to your own hardware, and the ecosystem, although it’s made a ton easier by tooling like LM Studio and HuggingFace’s Use This Model button. Early releases suffer from prompt template mismatches. But, these are usually patched extremely quickly. Needless to say, I’m not sure this is ready for production software development quite yet. The benefits, though, are numerous and the ecosystem critical to invest in, particularly now. One of the very cool parts of local models is you can introspect almost everything, like watching the token inference process live, and watching tokens in/out. You can do things like change the local context window and watch performance improve or degrade, and really dig into how your tokens are processed on the GPU. You can change the system prompt, the quantizations. You can pit models against each other. You can also change and introspect the harness side. The possibilities are endless, and the tools only keep getting better.

EU rules out mandate to keep video games playable, seeks voluntary code BRUSSELS, June 16 (Reuters) - The European Commission said on Tuesday it cannot require video games to remain playable after they are withdrawn from sale, but will work with industry and consumer groups on a voluntary code of conduct for managing games' "end of life". French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir sued Ubisoft in March after the video game maker shut down servers for its online racing game "The Crew", making it permanently unplayable for buyers. The case is backed by the "Stop Killing Games" campaign launched after the controversy. Ubisoft said players bought limited access, not full ownership. UFC-Que Choisir alleges the company misled consumers about how long the game would remain available and imposed unfair contract terms stripping players of ownership rights. The Commission said copyright and other intellectual property rules prevent it from imposing an obligation to keep games playable. It added it would work with consumer organisations and authorities to raise awareness of existing rights. "Active enforcement of these existing consumer rights can also incentivise the providers to offer video games with longer lifespans and explore solutions for meeting consumer expectations," the Commission said in a statement. UFC-Que Choisir and Stop Killing Games did not immediately respond to requests for comment. (Reporting by Makini Brice and Foo Yun Chee. Editing by Mark Potter)

Ireland needs to accelerate investment in public transport and EVs to reduce its emissions and its exposure to fossil fuel shocks, the Climate Change Advisory Council has said. The independent climate advisory body also said that the Government’s emergency measures for fuel price increases were not “sufficiently targeted”, and welcomed the incentive for the purchase of new electric vehicles. Transport is Ireland’s largest source of energy demand, making up 42 per cent of its energy demand and 22 per cent of national emissions. In the transport chapter of its Annual Review 2026, published on Wednesday, the council said Ireland must reduce the risk of it exceeding its emissions ceiling by speeding up investment in public transport, active travel, electric vehicle charging infrastructure and the grid capacity needed to support cleaner transport. It recommended that the Government introduce targeted supports within the transport sector for those most exposed and least able to avoid fuel costs, while maintaining planned carbon tax increases and continuing to ring-fence revenues for climate action. The Government announced it would postpone an increase in the carbon tax until the Budget in October, at a cost of €22 million, as part of over €750 million in support to help with rising energy costs due to the war in Iran. Fuel protests took place in April over rising prices, which saw cities, streets and motorways across Ireland clogged up and blockades of the country's only oil refinery in Co Cork. This prompted some panic buying at forecourts, hundreds of which ran dry, and after blockades were lifted in Dublin in a late-night policing operation almost a week after they began, the government unveiled half a million euro worth of measures to help with the rising cost of fuel. The measures included a reduction in excise duty on petrol, diesel and green diesel until the end of July, and further reducing minimum oil taxes by 10 cent per litre on petrol, 10 cent per litre on diesel, and 2.4 cent per litre on green diesel. “Fossil fuel shocks are not one-off events,” said chairperson of the Climate Change Advisory Council Alex White. “As long as Ireland remains heavily dependent on petrol and diesel for transport, people, businesses and public services will remain exposed to global price volatility and geopolitical crises. “The way to reduce that exposure is to give people real alternatives. “That means sustained investment in public transport, a charging network people can rely on, and the grid capacity needed to support the switch to electric across cars, buses and commercial fleets. “This transition also has to be fair. Supports should be targeted at those most exposed to transport fuel costs, particularly people on lower incomes and those who are car-dependent because they do not have access to practical alternatives. “The Government has set the right ambition to end Ireland’s reliance on fossil fuels; the test now is delivery.” The Council also warned that Ireland’s transport network must be made more resilient to extreme weather. It said Storm Chandra and prolonged rainfall in early 2026 exposed the vulnerability of road and rail infrastructure, underlining the need for climate risk to be built into transport planning, investment and design standards. The council is also calling for the updated National Ports Policy to be finalised and published, for greater investment in climate-resilient regional and local roads, and for vulnerable sections of the rail network to be assessed and climate-proofed. It also called for targeted measures to increase EV uptake among lower-income households, particularly in areas with limited access to public transport and high car dependency. The acceleration of the expansion of EV charging infrastructure, including the real time mapping of EV charging points to give people and businesses confidence in the alternatives to fossil fuel use, was also recommended. Publicly accessible charging infrastructure in Ireland remains well below the EU average.

The Stop Killing Games campaign has been dealt a major setback in Europe, as the European Commission declined to propose legislation requiring publishers to keep discontinued video games playable. The movement, formally submitted in the EU as the European Citizens’ Initiative “Stop Destroying Videogames,” was built around the idea that publishers should not be able to make games unplayable after ending official support, especially when those games were sold to customers as complete products. In January, the initiative was confirmed to have secured 1,294,188 verified statements of support, passing the one million threshold required for the European Commission to formally examine it. It was later presented to the Commission in February, followed by a European Parliament hearing in April and a plenary debate in May. EU rejects Stop Killing Games’ key demand In its official response on June 16, the Commission said it “cannot propose a legal obligation” requiring publishers to keep games playable after they stop being sold commercially. Instead, the Commission said it will begin discussions by the end of 2026 with the video game industry and consumer representatives to draft an industry code of conduct for managing games at the end of their life cycle. The Commission’s full communication said a legal obligation to keep games playable, as requested by the initiative, “would not be proportionate.” It cited concerns about intellectual property rights, confidential business information, publisher costs, and potential cybersecurity or safety risks once games are no longer supported. The code of conduct could include more transparent storefront labeling about possible game discontinuation, along with more partnerships between publishers and cultural heritage institutions to preserve games. However, it would not legally require publishers to provide offline patches, private server tools, or other methods for players to continue accessing games after official support ends. The Commission also argued that existing EU consumer law already provides some safeguards, including requirements around transparency, contract duration, termination conditions, and possible refunds if a shutdown conflicts with the agreement or a consumer’s reasonable expectations. Related Reuters reports the decision comes as French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir continues legal action against Ubisoft over The Crew, which became permanently unplayable after its servers were shut down. Ubisoft has argued players bought limited access rather than full ownership, while the consumer group alleges players were misled over how long the game would remain available. While the Stop Killing Games campaign succeeded in forcing the issue into EU institutions, the Commission’s response falls short of its central demand. For supporters, the outcome means publishers are not currently facing a new EU-wide legal requirement to keep purchased games playable once support ends. Stop Killing Games says the fight “will not be the end” Despite the setback, Stop Killing Games has said it is not ending its push for legislation. In a response posted after the Commission’s decision, the official Stop Killing Games account said the outcome was “not unexpected” and claimed the campaign had already prepared for the result. The group said it is now pushing for members of the European Parliament to amend Stop Killing Games into the Digital Fairness Act instead. “We can move on without the Commission and their non-decision,” the group said, referencing earlier comments from Accursed Farms creator Ross Scott. The response echoes comments made by the account on June 13, when it said the Commission’s decision would “not be the end” and pointed to progress in both California and the European Parliament. “We’re in a position to pass legislation on this even without the Commission’s blessing,” Stop Killing Games said at the time. “EU legislation should be going through either way.” The campaign also argued it was in a “better position than ever” to win, adding that supporters should thank the Commission for ensuring the movement did not “rest on our laurels.” That means the EU response is a major blow to the campaign’s original European Citizens’ Initiative, but not necessarily the end of Stop Killing Games’ broader efforts. The focus now appears to be shifting away from direct Commission action and toward influencing upcoming EU digital consumer legislation.

Roblox is rolling out separate age-based accounts for minors on the popular gaming platform, the company announced Monday. Starting in early June, the platform will put users ages 5 to 8 in Roblox Kids accounts, which disable all messaging by default and restrict users to games with a content maturity label of “minimal” or “mild.” Those ages 9 to 15 will be put into Roblox Select accounts, which gradually introduce more chat functions and allow access to games up to “moderate” content maturity. It’s the latest in a slew of safety updates to come to Roblox — the world’s biggest social gaming ecosystem for kids, with more than 151 million daily active users — as it faces mounting scrutiny over allegations it failed to shield its young users from child predators and inappropriate content. At least seven states have sued Roblox over issues of child safety, with more states investigating their own potential cases. Roblox is also at the center of dozens of individual lawsuits that have been consolidated into multidistrict litigation in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The lawsuits represent the cases of children around the country who are alleged to have been groomed by predators on Roblox. In some cases, families allege that victims died by suicide or were sexually assaulted in person after they were lured from their homes. Roblox’s introduction of age-based accounts builds on the age verification measures it launched this year, requiring all users to undergo biometric age checks to use the chat function. That process automatically estimates users’ ages and permits them to chat only with others estimated to be in similar age ranges. The rollout, however, was quickly met with user complaints of inaccurate age estimations and workarounds found by users hoping to trick the system. Roblox has told community members that it may periodically recheck users’ age if it suspects fraud or misrepresentation and that it aims to improve its detection of such behavior. As the platform prepares to release its Roblox Kids and Roblox Select accounts, the company said in a blog post that users’ age groups can be set by linked parent accounts or by Roblox’s own age-checking mechanisms. Upon age 16, users will transition to standard Roblox accounts with access to all content and chat functions. “This update will bring age-checks, account-level defaults, content ratings, ongoing moderation, and expanded parental controls together into a unified framework for younger users,” Roblox wrote. “Based on our selection criteria, we believe age-checked users under 16 will have access to the vast majority of their favorite games at launch.” Roblox’s parental controls, which first rolled out in 2024, allow parents with linked Roblox accounts to block specific games or users, choose whether their children can chat with others and set screen time and spending limits. But unless a parent enables chat, children under 13 are automatically blocked from direct messaging, and children under 9 are automatically blocked from in-game chats. In Monday’s announcement, the company said it will extend parents’ ability to manage direct chat settings and block individual games through age 15 rather than 13. Meanwhile, Roblox said it will continually select games available to users under 16 through a process that includes developer verification, evaluation of user reports and content maturity ratings. Later this year, it added, the company will begin transitioning to the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC) framework, a content rating standard used around the globe for digital games and apps. “These clear, region-specific ratings,” Roblox said, “reflect local cultural norms and will help families identify age-appropriate content while further reinforcing our alignment with global safety standards and local regulations.”