Ireland doesn’t need to import Britain’s gambling regulator, because it finally has its own. The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland (GRAI) works from an office on Lower Mount Street, and since 1 July every online bookmaker serving Irish punters has needed its licence instead of Revenue’s.
Adopted whole, the British model would be a step backwards where Ireland legislated harder. Taken rule by rule, though, two British measures would improve on what Ireland has written.
Ireland licensed the bookies first and left the casinos for later
Every bookie with a shop in the city needs a GRAI licence by 1 December, when Revenue’s last betting licences run out. Casino licensing keeps slipping. In the spring of 2025 the regulator expected to open remote gaming applications early this year; by the summer it was talking about next year and the year after. Money is part of the story: the GRAI asked for €26 million for this year and got about half, the Irish Times reported at the end of September.
Dublin has paid for that gap before. Nine days before Christmas in 2019, the Fitzwilliam Card Club in Dublin 2 shut with immediate effect after 16 years, costing almost 80 jobs. The private members’ club cited legal advice on that year’s Gaming and Lotteries (Amendment) Bill: it now needed a gaming permit or licence, it said, and neither was open to it.
Clubs like it are vetted under money-laundering law. Since 2018, anyone who effectively runs one has needed a certificate of fitness and probity, usually from a Garda superintendent. The 2024 Act creates a proper in-person gaming licence, but nobody can apply for one yet.
Britain caps the slot spin, not the whole casino
Britain’s online stake limit is narrow by design. Since spring 2025, online slots there have been capped at £5 a spin, or £2 for those aged 18 to 24. Roulette and blackjack fall outside the cap, the Gambling Commission’s guidance says.
The 2023 White Paper explains why: online slots carry “the highest average losses per active customer of any online product”. The government spared other games partly because Morgan Stanley estimated that a flat £2 limit would cut licensed takings from them by 92 per cent, which the paper judged “an unacceptably high risk of diversion to the unlicensed sector”.
That precision matters because an online casino sells a bundle of products. The games listed on 24casino.ie, an online casino brand, run from classic and video slots through blackjack, roulette and baccarat to live-dealer tables, poker, bingo, scratch cards and virtual sports. A British-style limit would reach one shelf of a lobby like that and leave the rest alone.
Ireland’s Act takes the opposite line. On its wording, Schedule 3 gives every game a gaming licence covers, online or in a venue, the same ceilings: a €10 stake and €3,000 in winnings. A hand at a licensed Dublin card table and a spin on a phone would share one cap.
Ireland should borrow the method, not the figures: set slot limits from evidence and judge table games on their own risks, even if that means amending Schedule 3. No cap changes the odds, though. A lower limit makes each loss smaller, not less likely, because the house edge is part of the game’s maths and a random number generator draws every slot outcome.
On advertising, Ireland already wrote the tougher rule
Here the comparison flips. Section 149 of the Irish Act would keep gambling ads off broadcast and on-demand services between 5:30am and 9pm, and section 146 would let them reach social media users only if they have subscribed to the advertiser’s own account. Britain’s 2023 White Paper weighed making its voluntary 9pm watershed statutory and judged further tightening of broadcast ads “not proportionate at this time”.
Ireland’s catch is commencement. Answering the Dublin West TD Ruth Coppinger this spring, the Justice Minister said neither rule had been commenced, and this month he told the Dáil that work to commence them was “underway”.
Britain’s caution had one fair point. Its White Paper warned that a statutory watershed could pile more gambling ads into the late-night schedule, and late-night play has been linked to heavier spending. Section 144, which would let the GRAI set the timing and frequency of ads, could handle that. On ads, Ireland should keep its own law and switch it on.
The British rule to copy first is self-exclusion
Since 2020, licensed online operators in Britain have had to join GAMSTOP, so one request covers them all, and 614,738 people were on it this summer. A customer who self-excludes in a British betting shop must also be offered a ban covering other operators’ shops nearby.
Ireland has half of that in law. Section 45 provides for a National Gambling Exclusion Register that would let people bar themselves from remote gambling indefinitely. It has yet to be switched on, and the Government has said it has no plans to extend it to in-person operators, so the city’s high-street bookies would sit outside it.
For now, self-exclusion here works operator by operator: licensees must close an account when the customer asks, just as they must turn away anyone under 18. Any register has limits: the White Paper found unlicensed sites increasingly targeting people who had self-excluded through GAMSTOP. Switch Ireland’s on with gaming licences, and stretch it to the shops.
For anyone who wants help now, the GRAI keeps a list of support services, from the free meetings of Gamblers Anonymous, whose helpline is 01 872 1133, to the Rutland Centre in Knocklyon, which launched a fully funded gambling programme in 2025.
So should Ireland adopt the British rulebook? Not wholesale. Britain took 18 years to get from its Gambling Act to its White Paper, then bolted slot limits onto a mature market. Ireland can write its casino rules before the first gaming licence is issued, a chance that won’t come round twice.
Image credit: Aoife Carrabine
