Eurostat lifted euro-area growth to 0.6% on the back of Irish GDP up 10.2%. Ireland's own statistics office says its domestic demand fell

Eurostat's estimate of 7 September put euro-area GDP growth in the second quarter of 2026 at 0.6 per cent, up from the 0.4 per cent of its preliminary flash on 30 July. The upgrade is Ireland's. Its quarterly growth, 3.9 per cent in the flash, now stands at 10.2 per cent — the highest in the European Union, more than five times the next, Slovenia's 1.8 per cent.

Computed from Eurostat's chain-linked volumes, Ireland supplied 0.34 points of the euro area's 0.63 per cent. The rest of the euro area grew 0.30 per cent, after 0.28 per cent in the first quarter and within a few hundredths of the 0.31 per cent this publication calculated from the flash on 31 July. The headline moved; the rest of the currency union did not.

Ireland's own Central Statistics Office, whose quarterly accounts supply the figure, publishes measures that point the other way. Its second-quarter accounts put GDP at €149.7 billion, up 10.2 per cent, driven by industry excluding construction, up 22.1 per cent — the sector in which multinationals book much of their output — while gross national product fell 5.0 per cent and modified domestic demand, the CSO's preferred gauge of the domestic economy, fell 0.8 per cent. On 7 September the CSO corrected its own infographic, which had described GDP as "down 10.2%".

The same revisions deepened Ireland's first-quarter contraction from 7.0 to 7.8 per cent. The euro area's first quarter, first published at plus 0.1 per cent and headlined as a contraction in June, still rounds to zero: computed from chain-linked volumes it is now minus 0.015 per cent, against plus 0.0005 per cent when this publication first computed it on 31 July.