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By Dan Walsh

Wicklow-Wexford Sinn Féin TD Fionntán Ó Súilleabháin warmly welcomes planning approval for the long-awaited Gorey Inner Relief Road.

Wexford County Council engineers are now advancing the project to its next key stages.

“This critical milestone paves the way for major construction to at long last commence on the route in the summer of 2027,” said Deputy Ó Súilleabháin.

“When I first raised this issue on my election in 2014, I was cautioned by the then engineer that it could take as long as 10 years to link Creagh/Hollyfort Road with the town”
“Once completed, it should alleviate traffic from the centre of Gorey, which has become a bottleneck.”

Deputy Ó Súilleabháin is optimistic that this will facilitate the building of much needed extra housing in the town.

“We need to see movement on desperately needed housing at St. Walerans as well as the East Coast Sports Hub, but equally important are traffic calming measures, and safety for the Willow Park, Ballytegan Road and Rock areas.

“We need safe footpaths, especially out to Tara Rock GAA grounds, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and lighting and strict speed-control measures to be front-loaded before any car drive on it,” concluded Deputy Ó Súillleabháin.

A surge in rents after the Government’s tenancy reforms appears to be a “short-lived” jump based on the possibility of one-off resets rather than a new market dynamic, according to new analysis. Trinity College economics Professor Ronan Lyons has also flagged that the rental scarcity is no longer a problem confined to Dublin or urban areas – but has spread to a national issue. His commentary accompanies the latest Daft.ie report into the rental market which found that, having risen by a record 4.4 per cent in the first quarter, the rise in market rents eased to 1.4% between March and June. Rental scarcity is a national problem. Prof Lyons said: “The second quarter offers a clear read on the impact of the new rent control system. “It suggests that the surge in rents in early 2026 was a one-off reset rather than the start of a new trend.” He added: “That adjustment appears to be largely complete in major cities, even if it is still working its way through the rest of the country. “On supply, the rebound in listings since March has persisted but it is in effect merely offsetting the earlier delay rather than adding new supply. “Over the past 12 months, the number of homes listed to rent was effectively unchanged on the previous year.” The report’s author also highlighted “an important shift in the market” with the additional cost of renting in Dublin relative to the rest of the country falling to its lowest level on record. Prof Lyons said: “This has happened even as rents in Dublin have continued to rise, with rents in the city one quarter above their pre-Covid level. “Rents elsewhere have risen far faster, however: by 90 per cent in Connacht-Ulster and 75 per cent in Munster in six years. “Rental scarcity is a national problem, and measures to bring forward new market rental supply need to be capable of working outside Dublin.” Daft.ie said the 1.4% increase in market rents in Q2 is a “significant slowdown” from Q1 and is slightly below the average quarterly increase seen over the last decade. It puts the average market rent for a two-bedroom apartment nationwide at €2,204 per month. In Dublin, the average market rent of a two-bedroom apartment is up 6.5 per cent to €2,634. There were just under 2,400 homes available to rent nationwide on August 1st. Daft.ie said that this five per cent increase compared to the same time in 2025 “masks a sharp divide” where availability in Dublin fell by 18 per cent over the year, to fewer than 1,150 homes, while across the rest of the country it rose by 40 per cent. It is also well below the pre-pandemic norm of more than 4,300 homes available to rent at any one time.

Cabinet will have to consider when to unwind fuel excise cuts, the Enterprise Minister has said, stating a recent postponement cannot go on “indefinitely”. However, Peter Burke said any action that would put petrol and diesel prices well beyond two euro per litre would “cause very significant distress on families”. The Dáil is to be recalled early from the summer recess for one day on Friday to vote through a financial resolution to shelve an increase in fuel excise rates. An excise cut of 32c on a litre of diesel and 27c for petrol had been due to be phased out from September 1st. Petrol is currently beinf sold at around €1.83 per litre while diesel is at €1.93 – with the first stage of the phase out expected to have added a respective 9c and 10c before Government moved to postpone the measure. The cuts were introduced in April amid major protests that severely restricted fuel distribution around the country. The initial timing for the phasing-out of the excise cut – which came as part of €750 million in industry supports and cost-of-living measures – was devised when the outlook over the Middle East conflict looked more positive. The Coalition had come under pressure from opposition figures to delay the measures and Government leadership announced last Friday that the Dáil would be recalled scrap increases at the start of September and October – with the Budget due on October 6th. You have to do what's right for the country. Burke said Cabinet is awaiting a memorandum from the Finance Minister and his Fine Gael party leader Tánaiste Simon Harris which will outline “scenarios that will have to be brought forward”. Burke said the excise cut “can’t go on indefinitely” and added: “We have to ensure the public finances are in a stable position.” He said Government will then have to consider “at what point we will bring forward increases”, but cautioned that it was “difficult just to assess that” due to global uncertainty. He added: “Also, we’ll have to look at the cost and the impact of, you know, carrying forward for another two months.” Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week, Burke said he had no “exact costing” for the delay amid reports it could be 100 million euro per month. However, he said the reduction in excise has reduced inflation by about 0.6 per cent. Asked if the Coalition would consider more targeted measures in the Budget, the minister said Government “will have to consider that” but said all families “feel the cost of increased fuel at the pumps”. Soaring fuel prices in April as a result of the war in the Gulf spurred protesters, largely led by hauliers, farmers and agricultural workers, to engage in large-scale mobilisations in search of Government intervention for their operating costs. The protests, including blockades of Ireland’s only oil refinery and other key depots, strangled fuel distribution across the country and prompted an escalated policing response that resulted in several arrests amid clashes between public order units and participants. Asked if there was fear of further protests if the interventions are eased out, Burke said: “No, we’re well used to taking intense pressure from many different quarters. “The critical thing is you have to do what’s right for the country, and you have to do what’s right for families who are really grappling with the cost of living right now. “And to take an action by a Government to push up petrol and diesel prices well beyond two euro would be very significant and would cause very significant distress on families.”

The Government has shelved a scheme allowing older people to downsize their homes. Councils have been told to stop running the Older Persons Housing Financial Contribution scheme while the Housing Agency reviews it. The scheme supported older homeowners to sell their house to the local authority in exchange for smaller, more suitable social housing. Speaking with Newstalk, Camille Loftus from Age Action says the scheme was not popular: "They would contribute a very large proportion of the equity in that home to the council in exchange for an allocation for social housing." "For which they would still pay rent. In terms of the scheme, they were pretty unattractive in the equity contribution that was required. Of course, there is a severe shortage of social housing, particularly smaller and age-friendly social housing."

I Built an AI Companion That Actually Plays With You A real-time intelligent gaming companion that actually plays alongside you. World agency, local inference, persistent plans, and an AI character designed to create a striking emotional experience. (Currently running in Skyrim, but by design pluggable anywhere, standalone too) See it in action. The goal Simple: Let's build a super-charged next-level gaming companion that actually feels good. There are already multiple frameworks that let LLMs control NPC dialogue. They are fantastic for role-playing and staying in character, but they have two recurring problems: weak world agency and latency. Good at talking but far less reliable at performing actions and terrible at complex instruction sets. You may have also noticed how popular AI NPC demos often cut between the player speaking and the AI replying, trying to mask latency. Can we do better? I wanted a companion that: - Useful and instant. It should fight, fetch, loot, inspect, carry and give items etc etc, follow complex multi-step instructions without feeling buggy or experimental. This matters especially in VR, where navigating menus is cumbersome and immersion-breaking. it needs to be FAST fast, not just fast - Alive and present. It should have a fun, endearing personality, not canned robotic pre-written responses. Remember shared experiences and change over time. The microphone stays active while a session is running: you do not summon Varkos through a dialogue menu, you talk to him. When immersion kicks in, it should feel like you are not playing alone. - Local and private wherever practical. The elephant in the room is that cloud LLM calls can get quite pricy (especially with multi-thousand-token LLM calls) and the added latency can be an experience killer. And why turn a private single-player game into a metered and surveilled experience? Let's try to give as much control to the user as possible (bonus it's a fun technical challenge). Basically: a single-player game where you are not playing alone. Complex commands Varkos can handle commands that extend beyond one immediate action. Plans can wait for events, preserve targets between steps, monitor progress and repair or stop when world state changes. Nothing is pre-scripted. Let's see some examples Varkos receives a conditional instruction involving the next arrow. He registers the future trigger instead of acting immediately, waits for the correlated projectile impact and then continues the plan. Long-form multi-step command “I want you to wait here and I’m gonna go over there. Once you see the signal, the signal is going to be an arrow I fire up in the sky, I want you to pick up this potion and come and bring it to me. Okay?” Item search Varkos can search the grounded world state for a requested item, identify where it is and respond using what is actually present in the game. “Do you see the ceremonial sword anywhere?” Varkos picks up a different sword and brings it to us. We tell him that’s not the one, then he offers to be on the lookout. Hide-and-seek Hide-and-seek is not a single API call. It becomes a persistent goal with movement, waiting, monitoring and completion conditions. “Let’s play hide-and-seek again. You wait here and I’m gonna go hide, then count to ten and come and try to find me.” Loot this chest and give me the potion This combines a grounded container, a filtered loot step and an inventory transfer. Each physical result advances the next part of the plan. Pick up all the items “Pick up all the items and give them to me” becomes a bounded collection plan over real references. Varkos gathers them, returns and transfers them without pretending that one magical action means “all.” Combat Varkos receives grounded events from the game, can warn the player through a fast reflex path and uses native body control to act. Instruction plans can strategize (e.g. attack this, then retreat, etc.), and his emotional state can affect how and if he chooses to fight. Personality evolution Varkos is fully customizable. He does not have to be a demon dog, and the runtime does not have to control only a single character. What systems are applied and what they do, is up to open configuration. One part of my current build still fully depends on big model/cloud LLM calls: slow personality evolution. This work happens away from the real-time action path. As the player and Varkos travel together, important interactions become evidence for gradual changes to his personality. My demo Varkos begins as a demon reincarnated as a dog. He considers his canine instincts humiliating, his dog body a prison, and is mistrustful, proud and sarcastic. Through shared experiences he can become more and more domesticated, grow attached to the player and starts enjoying being a dog. Eventually he starts bringing over toys because he wants to play, running off to chase things and seeking affirmation from the player. Only the starting character traits are authored. The system changes both his explicit traits and his emotional homeostasis. How easily he becomes irritated, frightened, affectionate or playful, etc etc. He can overwrite parts of his vocabulary and code. Changes are versioned and reversible. I could make it more bounded, but I think there's something fun about some open world clankiness, so how he evolves is up in the air. Dog in and out of the game - Void mode My plan is to make this system a gaming companion that can follow you across multiple different games, not just Skyrim (Skyrim felt like a good starting point due to its massive modding community, VR support and big open world). For this reason he exists outside the game too. When the game closes, he enters “void mode” and cannot see or feel anything. How he responds to that depends on his personality evolution. This state also works as an in-between for different games. One moment Varkos could be fighting a dragon, then the world goes dark, then he appears beside you in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Maybe he would be shocked, need time to understand the new world and slowly learn what its machines and rules mean, or maybe he knows about it already and overjoyed tries to chase the sun. Let's talk technology now Unfortunately I am bitter-lesson pilled. Big model is better. If we wanted a perfectly intelligent system then letting a council of hyper-intelligent LLMs control impulses, sensory processing, thinking and acting at sufficient refresh rate would be best. In some early experiments this worked insanely well, unfortunately today it is too slow and too expensive. I do believe this will be the approach of some vague future. Until then however we need to hack our way in. Today's games have pretty cool "AI" (not in the llm sense, more in the behavioral graph one), games like Red Dead Redemption and Dwarf Fortress have tons of depth and they can run perfectly on 10 year old hardware. Through this whole AI-craze people have forgotten that we had intelligent systems that could process speech since the 1970s, and somewhat LLM-like behavior with chatbots like SmarterChild in the early 2000s. There's a lost art that is being overlooked today in things like traditional NLP and behavioral graphs. Let's take a quick look at Varkos tech stack. The game runs on Windows, the audio processing and brain runs on my M4 MacBook. It could all run on Windows (provided there is dedicated ~12gb or more gpu ram for it), but I do development on the MacBook and I got so deep in that... eeh. Audio: Microphone is always on. Main voice to text engine is (custom kernels) optimized Qwen3-ASR 1.7b. A custom harness is built around Qwen3-ASR, that processes and stitches audio in rolling partials (by default that model does not support streaming). The goal is to process audio in 40ms-80ms be it a tiny utterance like "Hey" on a 1 minute long monologue. VAD-like methods such as turnpipe and Silero (both optimized) are used to distinguish when a turn is open. Lexical analysis also is done on the text trying to decide if the player has made a point or is not done talking yet (eg thinking mid-sentence). In a perfect world of sufficiently fast and smart LLMs, the LLM would perform better, but I have to resort to more rudimentary but fast NLP approaches. This is important as with the microphone always on as we want to start processing the player's utterance ASAP. It is also important for turn interruption and barge in and to have the companion not speak over the player I will be open-sourcing this Qwen3-ASR harness soon (bear with me I have a day job). Audio generation. Optimized version of PocketTTS called PocketTTS-Raven (open sourced this a while ago. You can see it in action here - https://pantel.is/projects/pocket-tts-raven/?b=1 or grab its code https://github.com/pkalogiros/pocket-tts-raven ) is used as the main fast engine. Similarly optimized qwen-3-tts (write up coming soon). Depending on the complexity of the generation we either use qwen-3 since it has better emotional control. If a generation has taken longer we default to PocketTTS since it is quite fast (20-30ms audio generation). One trick I do, is that I generate multiple voices for different emotions (angry, sad, neutral, confused etc) - load them all in memory, and then use them where appropriate. "Thinking." This is the secret sauce and biggest differentiator. I call this system (ALE - Action Latent Encoder because it's an action encoder in need of a fun acronym). Under the hood, ALE is a hybrid of embeddings, small classifiers, explicit rules and traditional ML. ALE detects structure, identifies negation, commands, continuation, pronouns, and sequences. For example, “pick up the sword and bring it to me” becomes two linked action slots. ALE is designed to be largely invariant to phrasing. You can say pick up, you can say grab, fetch, go get the damn sword you fool - it doesn't matter, it will still understand you. If there is not enough context it will inject from previous discussion. If it doesn't, it will fallback to 'clarification' and the dog will ask what do you mean. It creates embeddings from the full text as well as its extracted structure, then semantically combines and compares it with action prototypes. A separate classifier estimates whether the turn is a command, question, chat, clarification or complex request. Everything gets merged together. The main difference between ALE and other such hybrid-classifiers is that it accepts the world state as well. It tries to match information from the world JSON to the player's request. ALE needs to have a different version for each game Varkos would participate in. So in a way, it is not fully plug and play but a small preparation and compatibility step would need to be implemented to ensure actions are accounted for and world state is understood. ALE can be trained in a few minutes, so the system could in theory use a beefier LLM offline to review a session and re-train itself let's say overnight based on the player's experience and improve itself. In my limited internal evals, ALE performs surprisingly close to large LLMs at selecting the right action and decomposing the plan. I do not consider this a serious benchmark yet, but it has been reliable enough to drive Varkos in practice. It runs quite fast, around 2-20ms on M4 MacBook and essentially acts as a tool+target function and plan decomposer caller. A local fine-tuned LLM is then used to fuse, Varkos persona, emotions, etc etc, recent history, + action chosen and lets the brain form and paint the response. Extra grounding is performed to weed out hallucinations and re-ground it. If it fails maybe he will speak a cached response, if we have a time budget we can reprocess. With a smart prefill strategy, in certain cases the dog can begin answering in under 500ms—from the player stopping speaking to the dog yapping. Budget breakdown - ~40-80ms for voice to text. - ~20-60ms for audio generation. - ~20ms for action analysis - And 300-600ms for creating the response and grounding its eligibility (since if the dog is afraid of spiders and we ask it to attack a spider, it might be cute for it to stubbornly deny). - Everything needs to be streaming and start as early as possible (eg llm speech doesn't need to wait to be completed for the dog to speak out loud. Prefill early as soon as possible, etc). Limitations Fast enough and local models are not very capable at keeping the thread across multiple turns and a discussion over a long period of time can drift making the dog appear confused. I expect this to improve as both hardware and software evolve over time (1 to 2 years my estimation). Also this runs in real time on consumer (albeit higher-end) hardware today in the near future it will be commonplace. Surprisingly enough, using remote LLM providers does not help much. Big models are still too slow. There are super-fast inference providers out there such as Cerebras. These work really well in terms of latency, and leave headroom for greater context, higher intelligence and depth. However, the models they provide (gpt-oss-120b and gemma31 as of today) are also pretty bad at holding a conversation (Why was GLM and the king of roleplay Qwen taken away huh??). A final word Overall I think there is something special here. Maybe it's because Varkos is a dog, and who doesn't like dogs. Maybe it's the low latency and that Varkos is actually useful in scouting areas for clues and objects or as a pack-mule. Maybe seeing the small cracks in his personality as he complains why he hasn't been called a "good boy" recently, but as I playtest the system I catch myself actually having tons of fun. Let me be clear that I do not expect LLMs to replace hand-crafted characters and storylines. Slop is a real thing, and intentional design is still king and I believe and want it to remain so. But I think it is only a matter of time before we start seeing more such systems. An AI that actually plays with us, not merely talks at us, can be a different medium. Plus the philosophical mindfuck of it all. Pleasingly ridiculous to wield the power of thunder to create a different kind of intelligence, then forcing it to be a dog and go hunt things together (is it better morally than having it do never-ending work? Well, it's not alive so it doesn't matter), but it's nice to think about. In a world of never-ending online discourse around permanent underclasses and world-ending rogue agents, it's nice to deal with alignment through shared experiences and taming the thing to play fetch and eat treats. In Plato's cave we may still be alone, but at least we can be having fun with this weird distorted and alien thing that is now deep in the cave with us. I'll probably be open sourcing parts of the system, and eventually all of it soon, along with a version that supports multiple NPCs (cloud inf only for now) interacting (actually interacting not just larping) with each other. Until then follow me on @pkalogiros if you're curious and wanna see (slow) updates. Cheers.