Irish Client Sales to Scotland Jump 46 Percent

Enterprise Ireland client exports to Scotland grew 46% in 2025, with more than 300 of its firms now selling into that market. Breda Doherty, the agency’s senior market adviser for Scotland, ties the rise to work in energy, utilities, housing and digital networks rather than a broad lift in British demand.

The extra sales sit on long Scottish programmes that pay out over years, and on rules that do not match the rest of the UK. Firms that only ship from Ireland, or copy an English pitch, keep missing that point.

The 46% Rise Sits on Scottish Public Work

Doherty’s note, issued on 13 September 2026, is the first public split that isolates Scotland inside Enterprise Ireland’s UK book. Client companies as a group booked a record €38.86 billion of exports in 2025, up 7.6% on 2024, and the UK still took 29% of that total. Scotland is the slice that moved fastest.

THE 2025 SCOTLAND SNAPSHOT

• Scotland sales: Enterprise Ireland client exports to Scotland rose 46% in 2025.
• Exporters: More than 300 client firms now sell into Scotland.
• Global book: Client exports reached €38.86 billion in 2025, up 7.6%.
• UK weight: The UK accounted for 29% of those exports.

Those firms span manufacturing, engineering and construction, technology, financial and business services, healthcare, agritech and consumer goods. Many of the new orders sit behind Scotland’s energy transition and climate-tech spend, which is why a 46% sales jump can arrive without a matching wave of brand-new factories.

Enterprise Ireland already runs 42 offices worldwide. Three of them serve the UK, in London, Manchester and Glasgow, after the agency also opened Atlanta and Zurich in 2025. The Glasgow desk exists because Scottish buyers, in Doherty’s account, reward firms that learn local priorities and then deliver on them.

Kirby’s Place on a £5.4bn Grid Framework

The largest single illustration is the grid. SP Energy Networks, the ScottishPower unit that runs the wires in central and southern Scotland, began a five-year £12bn rewiring plan on 1 April 2026. The T3 programme is meant to add 12 major substations and upgrade or replace more than 570km of lines, with 1,400 direct jobs and more than 11,000 more in the supply chain.

Limerick-based Kirby Group Engineering has worked with that network for 13 years. It now sits on a strategic framework that will feed Kirby and 18 other suppliers up to £5.4bn (€6.28bn) of contracts over 10 years. Seventeen of the 19 partners are headquartered in the UK or Ireland. The pot splits as up to £3bn on new overhead lines and £2.4bn on new and upgraded substations.

SCOTLAND’S GRID MONEY AND KIRBY’S SHARE

Kirby has two Scottish offices and has moved into a larger Glasgow base to house the extra work. It now employs 180 people there, with 70 extra jobs already created and more planned. In 2025 it logged 10,000 apprentice hours on SP Energy Networks jobs, almost three times the 2023 level, and three more apprentices join the Scottish team in 2026. The group employs more than 1,900 people worldwide. Iberdrola, ScottishPower’s parent, named it global supplier of the year in 2025.

Through our strategic partnership with SP Energy Networks, we are expanding our operations, creating employment opportunities and scaling our training and development programmes. The delivery of this critical infrastructure upgrade is already creating high quality, skilled jobs and will leave a legacy of social value in communities across Scotland.

Michael Murray, Power and Renewables Director, Kirby Group Engineering

SP Energy Networks chief executive Nicola Connelly has called the next five years the period in which Britain either gets the clean-power build done or does not, describing the work as the biggest overhaul of the electricity grid since it was first built. For Irish contractors, the second effect is simpler: a framework seat turns a sales spike into a decade of call-off work, which is the kind of book that shows up as 46% growth in a single year.

Damp and Mould Law Opens a Second Order Book

Housing is the other Scottish spend that does not travel well from England. The Investigation and Commencement of Repair (Scotland) Regulations 2026 were made on 24 March 2026. They take effect on 6 October 2026 and put damp or mould duties for landlords on a fixed clock. Scotland is applying the rules to social and private tenancies.

The package is branded Awaab’s Law, after two-year-old Awaab Ishak, who died in 2020 from a lung condition linked to mould in an English housing-association flat. Housing Secretary Màiri McAllan said 90% of Scottish homes are already free of damp and mould and that the new duties are meant to cover the rest, with rules she described as practical for landlords to run.

THE CLOCK ON DAMP AND MOULD

1. 24 March 2026: Scottish ministers make the Investigation and Commencement of Repair (Scotland) Regulations 2026.
2. April 2026: Social landlords start reporting damp and mould performance to the Scottish Housing Regulator through the Annual Return on the Charter.
3. 6 October 2026: The duties take effect for social and private landlords.

From that October date a competent person must investigate a report within 10 working days. The landlord then has 3 working days after the check to send a written summary, and 5 working days to start repairs if the damp or mould is substantial. Social landlords must finish that repair within 20 working days of starting; private landlords must finish in a reasonable time.

Aico, the Shannon-based home-safety brand owned by Ei Electronics, has been rewriting its software around that clock. The company published HomeLINK updates for Scottish landlords so associations can log cases, keep evidence, and file the new charter return. Doherty says Aico was nominated for a public-sector partner award for work with Barrhead Housing Association and Glasgow City Region, and she uses it as the case of an Irish firm that stopped selling boxes and started sitting inside the landlord’s compliance process.

WHAT LANDLORDS MUST NOW PROVE

• The check: A competent person inspects within 10 working days of the landlord learning of damp or mould.
• The note: A written summary goes to the tenant within 3 working days of that inspection.
• The start: If the problem is substantial, repair work begins within 5 working days.
• The finish: Social landlords complete the job within 20 working days of starting.

Barrhead Housing, working with Aico and installer MCN, put 140 smart sensors into 28 sheltered homes under Glasgow City Region’s Smart and Connected Social Places programme. The kit tracks energy use, heat loss and indoor conditions in a stock where 72% of Barrhead’s homes sit in Scotland’s most deprived areas. That is a small trial against a national duty, but it is the shape of the work Irish safety and data firms are being hired to do.

A Playbook That Stops at the Border

Doherty has lived and worked in Scotland for nearly 20 years, and her warning is blunt. Scottish organisations, she writes, want firms that take time to learn local priorities, keep promises, and show how a product solves a Scottish problem. A local base is how a supplier stays close to those buyers and to a separate legal and commercial setting.

She recounts a talk with a local-authority official who said methods that work elsewhere in the UK often fail in Scotland. Her example is an energy-efficiency housing scheme that ignores Scotland’s distinctive housing stock and then hits problems nobody budgeted for. The same product, sold with an English case study, can stall.

That is why the 46% figure is a lagging indicator. The firms booking the growth are the ones that already changed how they sell: they hired in Glasgow or Aberdeen, sat on a framework, or rebuilt software for a Scottish regulator. The ones that treat Scotland as the north of an English territory keep walking into the housing-stock problem Doherty describes.

Enterprise Ireland’s own UK lead makes the same claim in plainer words. Scotland’s mix of offshore wind, battery storage, grid upgrades and marine engineering lines up with Irish engineering, but only if the supplier is close enough to hear the specification change.

The Irish Plants Already on Scottish Soil

On 1 May 2025, minister of state Niamh Smyth led a one-day mission through Edinburgh and Glasgow and opened the new office. Enterprise Ireland said ten clients announced Scottish expansions that day, against what it called more than £50 billion of offshore wind projects in development. Scotland’s business minister, Richard Lochhead, said Irish firms were taking work in renewables and creating jobs on both sides of the Irish Sea.

IRISH MOVES ANNOUNCED IN MAY 2025

• Glennon Brothers: An £18 million timber-frame plant at Alexander Timber Design in Irvine, taking the Longford group’s Scottish spend above €80 million, opened by First Minister John Swinney on 24 April 2025.
• Uniquely: A Glasgow office, with 100 Scotland jobs inside 12 months as part of 300 UK jobs.
• Subsea Micropiles: First commercial install for Orkney Harbour Authority after more than £10 million of R&D, plus a £9.2 million (€11 million) Scottish National Investment Bank round and a plan for 100 jobs over five years.
• Cleantech Civils: A new Scottish office in Coatbridge, North Lanarkshire, for water and wastewater work.
• Rubicon Archaeology: A £2 million investigations contract on the A9 dualling between the Tay Crossing and Ballinluig, and a new office in Bathgate.

Smyth also walked the Winchburgh wastewater plant near Edinburgh, designed and built by Enterprise Ireland client EPS, and sat in roundtables on offshore wind, agriculture and water. Other names on the day’s list included Senus with AgriGroup, Easyfix with a new East and Southeast Scotland distributor, TEKenable on a digital programme for PureMalt, McGrath Limestone adding silos in Fife, and Suir Engineering buying Taylor and Fraser to widen its UK mechanical and electrical book.

Glennon’s Irvine line is the clearest housing-side plant: Scottish logs through the Troon sawmill, then frames for central-belt housebuilders, under a “forest to front door” pitch joint managing director Mike Glennon has used with Irish housing minister John Cummins. It is local manufacturing for a Scottish shortage, not an export invoice from Longford. That is the pattern the 46% is catching.

What the 2026 UK Survey Says About Scotland

Enterprise Ireland ran its UK Market Sentiment Survey in February 2026 among clients that already export to the UK, and published it on 9 March 2026 from 196 replies. Scotland accounts for 16% of the Irish footprint in that sample, the same share as the South of England, and 26% of the Scotland-focused firms planned a large rise in investment. A formal Irish-Scottish government memorandum on energy, industry and education is, the agency says, already shaping those calls.

WHERE IRISH FIRMS SIT IN THE UK

The table is the caution inside the 46% headline. Scotland already holds a sixth of the Irish UK footprint, and engineering firms there are busy on wind, storage and the grid, yet a smaller share of those Scotland-focused companies planned a large extra bet than in the South of England or Wales. Sales can jump on frameworks while new plants lag. Kirby’s 13-year relationship is the extreme version of that: the 2025 invoice growth sits on work that was sold years earlier.

Across the UK sample, 64% of firms had a physical site and 35% had more than one. Of those with a site, 60% planned to raise UK investment, including 22% planning a large rise, and 67% expected to grow UK staff in the next 12 months. Among firms with no UK base, 36% planned to hire their first UK employee that year. Some 95% called the UK a critical or very important market, with average confidence of 7.8 out of 10.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin, welcoming the survey, said Irish companies employ in the region of 150,000 people across the UK, a figure Enterprise Ireland sourced to the British Irish Chamber of Commerce. Jenny Melia, the agency’s chief executive, called the pattern a shift from a traditional export model to a settled operating presence. Construction and the built environment posted the highest sector confidence, at 8.1 out of 10, on the back of the energy transition and the AMP8 water cycle.

Glasgow Is Now Enterprise Ireland’s Third UK Office

The Glasgow hub sits at Spaces, 1 West Regent Street, G2 1RW. It opened on 1 May 2025 as the third UK office after London and Manchester, with Laura Brocklebank listed as UK manager for industrial sectors and Lynn Obi as senior market adviser for UK offshore wind. Enterprise Ireland’s own account called the opening “a signal of a long-term commitment to Scotland and to the UK.”

Enterprise Ireland has today officially opened its new office in Glasgow as part of a trade mission to Scotland, led by Minister Niamh Smyth TD, Minister of State for Trade Promotion, Digital, and Company Regulation.

This trade mission, visiting Edinburgh and Glasgow, will focus… pic.twitter.com/JwShWczPRa

— Enterprise Ireland (@Entirl) May 1, 2025

Deirdre McPartlin, who leads the UK, Nordics and new exporters brief, used the opening to say the market’s mix is best read from inside it.

Enterprise Ireland’s new Glasgow office signals a long-term commitment to Scotland as a key market and will further support the success and impact of Irish enterprise across the UK, our largest export market. Scotland represents a dynamic growth market for Irish companies and its unique characteristics are best understood through a local presence.

Deirdre McPartlin, Head of UK, Nordics and New Exporters, Enterprise Ireland, 1 May 2025

From 6 October 2026, every social and private landlord in Scotland will have to hit that damp-and-mould clock, while SP Energy Networks is still in year one of a five-year, £12bn rewire. The 46% is the 2025 invoice line those programmes already threw off. The open question for the firms still selling from Ireland is whether they take Doherty’s advice and put people next to the customer before the next framework is awarded.