The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland (GRAI) will take charge of the online Irish betting market this week in the final stage of the biggest regulatory overhaul of the country’s gambling sector in decades.
Created by the Gambling Regulation Act 2024, the GRAI has been extending its authority over Irish betting since its creation in March 2025. From 1 July, it will take on licensing duties for online betting companies, a role previously held by Ireland’s Revenue Commissioners.
The Irish betting sector is a vast one, with over €2.5bn (£2.15bn) in revenue expected from 2025 alone.
Ireland has also spawned major international players, the case-in-point example being Flutter Entertainment, while it is also a core market for a number of overseas firms, particularly ones from the neighbouring UK.
The substantial change in oversight this week is one international industry leadership should be paying close attention to.
“This is the most fundamental reform of gambling regulation in Ireland since the formation of the Irish state,” says Alan Heuston, a partner at Irish gambling law specialists McCann FitzGerald LLP.
“We are in effect going from a place where there was in effect no effective regulation of online gambling in Ireland to a place where we will have a dedicated regulator responsible for regulating the entire industry and where we will have the most up to date gambling regulation in the EU.”
Irish betting’s generational moment
As Heuston notes, the Gambling Regulation Act was a watershed moment for Irish betting, replacing legislation almost as old as the Republic of Ireland itself.
For most of the state’s existence, Irish betting was governed by two key pieces of legislation – the Totalisator Act of 1929 and Betting Act of 1931, which largely concerned retail betting shops and on-course racetrack bookmakers.
“The first key requirement for all operators is that from 1 July they will need to have a B2C Betting Licence if they wish to continue to provide sports betting in Ireland,” says Heuston.
“Once these licences go live, the operators will need to ensure that they are compliant with obligations that apply to operators relating to verification of customers, obligation to maintain customer money in segregated accounts etc.
“Our advice is that operators need to carefully review the licensing obligations that apply to ensure that you are compliant.”
It’s fair to say that the Irish betting space has changed somewhat since the 1930s.
Along with other European nations, Ireland experienced the rise of online gambling during the 2000s, and the sector enjoyed particular growth in tandem with Ireland’s emergence as a major technology hub.
By the 2020s, the government was acutely aware that the legislation governing Irish betting was in need of modernisation. In October 2021, the Department of Justice proposed the Gambling Regulation Bill to achieve this modernisation.
As James Browne, the then-Minister of Justice, put it at the time: “We all accept that the current legislative framework is fragmented, outdated, lacks a coherent licensing and regulatory approach, and is in need of significant reform.”
In Heuston’s view, it is “fair to say that this was an accurate assessment of the regulatory regime which applied before the Gambling Regulation Act 2024 was passed”.
A first for Ireland
The GRAI is the first national regulator for Irish betting in the sector’s history.
As mentioned above, the still-young regulator is taking charge of online gambling licensing from the Revenue Commissioners.
Jim O’Callaghan, the incumbent Minister of Justice, approved the regulator’s online licensing remit in February with the intention of permits being issued “for new entrants as soon as is feasible”.
Under the 2024 Act, the has been given several key tasks:
- Overweight and licensing of gambling activities in the Republic of Ireland, and enforce compliance with regulatory requirements.
- The creation and administration of a Social Impact Fund, which operators must pay into to support gambling research, education and treatment programmes.
- To create and manage a national gambling exclusion register, similar to the UK’s Gamstop, Australia’s BetStop, and the Netherlands’ CRUKS.
- Impose licensing obligations on areas like inducements and advertising, with a key measure of the 2024 Act being a ban on gambling advertising between 5:30am-9:00pm to avoid children being exposed to this marketing activity.
The only area of Irish gambling the regulator does not have a remit over is the National Lottery, which continues to be overseen by the Regulator of the National Lottery under the National Lottery Act 2013.
“For Irish-facing online operators, this is a step-change rather than an incremental reform,” says Heuston. “It brings online betting and gaming into a more conventional modern regulatory model: licensing, account-based controls, safer gambling tools, advertising restrictions, prescribed information duties, technical and compliance expectations, and active supervision by a specialist regulator.
“Prior to the GRAI Act being enacted the Revenue Commissioners had limited powers and once a remote betting licence was issued their role was primarily to ensure that betting duty was paid on betting and VAT paid on eGaming.
“It should also be noted that prior to the GRA Act there was no pathway to obtain a licence for online gaming in Ireland. This will change under the GRA Act with online businesses for the first time being able to obtain a B2C Gaming licence in Ireland once these go live in 2027.”
Irish betting and society
The Irish betting market has a great deal in common with other European betting markets – it shares many of the same operators, for one thing. The conversations around its regulation, however, also share manny of the same sentiments.
In recent years, a public health-oriented view of gambling has taken on greater prominence in public discourse. This is the idea that gambling should be viewed and regulated as a public health issue rather than a business one.
Over in the UK, increasingly vocal calls for gambling to be framed this way have been heard from MPs, researchers and campaigners alike, but the sector remains under the political remit of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).
Back in Ireland, while the GRAI falls under the oversight of the Department of Justice, Heuston remarks that the Gambling Regulation Act of 2024 “has been framed as a public health measure” from the outset.
Commenting in 2021, Minister Browne said that: “At its core, this legislation is a public health measure aimed at protecting our citizens from gambling harm, including younger people and those more vulnerable in our communities.”
He added that: “The Bill takes a responsible approach to balancing the freedom to gamble with the safeguards to protect people from falling prey to addiction. This Bill provides a clear framework for operators and for consumers”.
Reflecting on the Act’s objectives, Heuston adds: “Given that the GRA Act has been framed as a public health measure it will be of little surprise to find that it contains significant and wide ranging measures designed to protect consumers.”
Notable health related measures include the above-mentioned creation of a self-exclusion register and the Social Impact Fund, with Heuston listing the latter’s funding objectives as being “research, raising awareness and providing facilities for those impacted by issues arising from gambling”.
Additional health-oriented licensing measures include an obligation for companies to enable customers to set monetary limits on how much they can gamble, restrictions on gambling with credit, and the above mentioned controls on inducements, sponsorships and advertising.
As with any regulatory overhaul, however, there are always some who feel that it could have gone further. Calls for a total ban on advertising in Ireland are still being heard from some political circles, and concerns about gambling’s impact on society remain.
According to the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), some 3.3% of the Republic of Ireland’s population suffers from problem gambling. The institute estimates that a further 7% of the Irish population are at moderate risk of gambling harm.
These figures, coupled with the billions of euros made by the Irish betting sector, mean that social responsibility concerns and scrutiny of the industry’s societal impact will not go away any time soon.
Irish betting and cross-border commerce
I’ve noted throughout this article that the Irish betting space has a great deal in common with other European markets. A market with a lot of similarities is the UK – as it happens, the UK’s review of its 2005 Gambling Act between 2020-2023 largely coincided with the passage of Ireland’s Gambling Act between 2021-2024.
The two nations share a lot of the same bookmakers, for one thing.
Ireland’s Paddy Power is a popular site in the UK and its betting shops are familiar on UK high streets, while its merger with UK betting exchange Betfair, completed in 2016, laid the foundations for the creation of Flutter Entertainment, now the world’s third largest listed gambling company and at one point the largest.
Notable UK firms to operate in Ireland include William Hill, BetVictor and bet365, while Irish bookmakers like BoyleSports have also been expanding in the UK with the brand now operating hundreds of shops there, as well as its online site.
For firms active in both countries, the mishmash of jurisdictions may get a bit confusing, however.
In Great Britain, the Gambling Commission is the regulator responsible for licensing and oversight of the betting sector. In Ireland, it is the newly created GRAI.
Northern Ireland is an outlier, however, as gambling does not fall under the UK’s 2005 Gambling Act nor the Gambling Commission, with the country having its own legislation – the Betting, Gaming, Lotteries and Amusements (NI) Order 1985.
As in both Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland, Northern Irish lawmakers are aware that the 1985 needs bringing into the modern day, but the long-running political deadlock at Stormont during the 2020s has hindered any progress.
Companies active in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland may want to tread carefully.
“There is no obligation to provide geolocation blocking,” says Heston. “However, the onus is on operators to ensure that if they are taking bets from Irish customers that they have a licence.
“Therefore operators need to have systems in place to ensure that they can accurately determine the location of customers. From 1 July if an operator has customers in Ireland placing bets they need to have a remote betting licence.
“If they do not have a remote betting licence then they are in breach of the obligations of the GRAI Act.”
