Maxime Delcourt feed

The most interesting question in Irish gambling regulation right now is not being asked about casinos or bookmakers. It is being asked about a category of activity that did not exist at meaningful scale when the Gambling Regulation Act 2024 was being drafted, that sits at the intersection of financial markets and sports betting, and that has accumulated hundreds of millions in trading volume during a year in which its most dramatic events were a US presidential election and multiple geopolitical crises.

Prediction markets — platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi that allow users to bet on the outcome of real-world events by taking the other side of another user's position rather than betting against the house — have, by most available measures, become a mainstream product in the past eighteen months. They attracted serious attention during the 2024 US election cycle when large positions on specific outcomes generated significant media coverage and, for some traders, significant profits. In 2025 and into 2026, the category has expanded beyond elections into geopolitics, sports, economics, health outcomes, and what Professor Karl Whelan of UCD described, with notable dryness, as "events where it gets a lot less harmless."

The figure of the “player” has long been flattened into a caricature that no longer corresponds to reality, especially in markets like Ireland where cultural habits, digital literacy, and everyday rhythms intersect in ways that quietly reshape behaviour. The persistent image of someone sitting for hours in front of a screen, immersed in prolonged sessions driven by intensity or escape, is not only outdated but actively misleading, because it obscures the far more subtle and structurally important shift that has taken place over the past decade. What defines the Irish player today is not duration, but fragmentation; not immersion, but repetition; not a single extended interaction, but a sequence of brief, almost incidental returns distributed across the day.

The rollout of a digital identity wallet with built-in age verification is being framed as a child protection measure, but that framing understates what is actually happening. This is not the introduction of a feature — it is a redefinition of access. For years, the internet scaled on a deliberately loose model of identity, where users could be analysed, predicted, and monetised without formal verification at the point of entry. That ambiguity was not a flaw; it was structural. What is emerging now begins to remove it, replacing fluid participation with controlled entry.

For the past decade, the direction of car design felt inevitable.

Bigger screens. Fewer buttons. Cleaner dashboards that looked more like smartphones than machines. The logic seemed obvious: if everything in life is moving toward digital interfaces, why should cars be any different?

But that assumption is now being quietly challenged. Not by nostalgia. By safety.