Ireland's Bookmakers File 163 Notices for In-Person Licences Six Weeks Before the 1 December Switch

Ireland's gambling regulator has now published 235 notices of intent to apply for a licence, and most of the recent ones come from racecourse and high-street bookmakers whose Revenue licences expire on 30 November. Its own register shows how far it still has to go: one in-person betting licence issued so far.

• The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland (GRAI) listed 235 notices of intent to apply for a licence on 22 October, and 163 of them concern in-person betting, on racecourses, in shops or both
• In-person bookmakers move to GRAI licences from 1 December, when the licences Revenue issued for the year to 30 November expire, after remote betting licences started on 1 July
• 141 notices are for on-course betting, 126 of them published on a single day, 26 August, in one national newspaper, mostly by individual bookmakers trading under their own names
• Only 24 notices cover off-course premises, among them Flutter Entertainment, BoyleSports and Ladbroke Limited, in a country that had 684 betting shops at the end of 2025
• The GRAI's licence register, updated on 20 October, lists 42 licences, only one of them for in-person betting, and 41 companies that gave notice of a remote application are not yet on it

Ireland's Racecourse and Shop Bookmakers Are Queuing for the Second Phase of Licensing

The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland's public list of notices of intent to apply for a licence ran to 235 entries on Thursday, 22 October, with three more on-course bookmakers added that day. Section 95 of the Gambling Regulation Act 2024 requires anyone seeking a gambling licence, or its renewal, to publish such a notice at least 28 days before applying and send a copy to the authority, which must publish it on its website.

The surge of in-person notices follows the timetable set when the licensing regime was switched on. A commencement order that took effect on 5 February repealed the Betting Act 1931 and let the GRAI accept applications, which it opened on 9 February for remote betting, remote betting intermediary and in-person betting licences. Justice Minister Jim O'Callaghan said at the time that the authority would license remote operators from 1 July 2026 and in-person operators from 1 December 2026, when their existing licences, issued by the Office of the Revenue Commissioners, expire. Revenue's own guidance says bookmaker's licences for the period 1 December 2025 to 30 November 2026, and any registered bookmaking offices, expire on 30 November.

Under the GRAI's guidance, an in-person notice must list every premises the licence will cover and appear in a local newspaper in each local authority area, plus a national daily for larger estates. Bookmakers who bet only at racecourses, greyhound tracks, coursing grounds and point-to-point meetings publish in a national newspaper only. Shop applicants also face a physical assessment of their premises by a GRAI representative.

What the 235 Notices Show

Of the 235 notices, according to an iGaming Times count of the GRAI's list, 139 are for on-course betting alone and two more combine on-course and shop betting. Another 14 are for in-person betting only and eight combine in-person and remote betting, so 24 notices cover off-course premises. The remaining 72 are for remote betting, four of them including intermediary licences, the category that covers betting exchanges.

The on-course filings arrived almost all at once: 126 notices were published on 26 August in The Irish Daily Mail, and 135 appear on the GRAI's list with a 16 September date. Individual bookmakers trading in their own names account for 130 of the 141.

The shop notices include Flutter Entertainment, which published on 25 June, BoyleSports, for in-person and on-course betting, and Ladbroke Limited, which published in March. Other shop notices come from Bar One Racing, Betbyrne, McBride Racing, Paul Fay Bookmakers and three Fox Entertainment companies; McBride's, published on 1 October, is the most recent. The GRAI's annual report counts 684 betting shops at the end of 2025, down from 1,385 in 2008, and a single notice can cover many shops, so the 24 notices say little about how many premises are involved.

The register of licence holders, last updated on 20 October, lists 37 remote betting licences, four remote betting intermediary licences and one in-person betting licence, issued on 23 July to an individual bookmaker. Of the 80 companies that published notices for remote licences, 39 appear on it. Among the 41 that do not are TSG Interactive Gaming Europe, Petfre (Gibraltar), Gamesys Operation and Bet-at-home.com Internet, some of whose notices date from February and March. A notice signals intent; the GRAI does not publish which applications have been made or are under assessment.

The Racecourse Filings Show the Regime Reaching Its Smallest Operators

The 141 on-course notices are the clearest sign of what the 2024 Act changes. Bookmaker's licences that Revenue issued under the Betting Act 1931 are giving way to a regime that asks a sole trader with a pitch at a racecourse to pass the same fit-and-proper, financial-capacity and lawful-funding tests as an online sportsbook, with the same public notice. The 126 notices published on one day in one newspaper suggest the on-course trade organised its filings collectively, a sensible response to a fixed date. For the GRAI it means a wave of small, similar applications, each of which still has to be assessed on its merits.

Twenty-Four Shop Notices Leave Little Room for Late Movers

The arithmetic of section 95 is unforgiving. A notice published after the first days of November cannot lead to an application before Revenue licences lapse at the end of the month, and premises inspections take time that remote applications did not need. With one in-person licence on the register in three months, the GRAI has a great deal of work to do in six weeks, and any bookmaker not yet on the list is already short of time. The shop estate is shrinking anyway: Entain closed over a third of its Irish Ladbrokes shops in April, and operators still do not know the rate of the Social Impact Fund levy they will pay as licensees. A licensing deadline may lead some marginal shops to close rather than apply.

Half the Remote Hopefuls Are Still Unlicensed, and Some Notable Names Are Missing

The GRAI's annual report counted about 91 active remote bookmaker licences under the old system in February, and its register now holds 37 remote betting licences, not a like-for-like comparison, since one operator can hold several, but a hint that part of the old licence base has yet to cross over. Of the companies that gave notice for remote betting, 41 are still not licensed, some of them eight months on. Equally telling is who has not filed: no notice carries the name of Stake, which left Ireland in September and said it would look to apply for a licence, or of Kalshi or Polymarket, even though the GRAI says prediction markets that offer betting need a remote betting intermediary licence. Notices are filed under company names, so an affiliated entity could still appear, but on the public record the channelisation test is still being decided by who chooses to apply.

The notices list is the earliest public evidence of who intends to stay in Ireland's licensed market, and it now shows the trade's smallest operators moving in numbers. Whether the GRAI can licence them all by 1 December is the first real test of its capacity.