This article includes gambling-related content. Irishblogs.ie is committed to providing accurate and responsible information. To ensure the highest standards of quality and safety, all gambling-related content is curated and verified by industry experts. Please engage responsibly!
The Regulatory Position, Such As It Is
The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland issued a statement in late April 2026 in response to RTÉ's This Week programme, which had asked Professor Colin O'Gara of St John of God's addiction services to comment on prediction markets. The GRAI's position, stated in that response, is that prediction markets "bear the hallmarks of betting activity" — and that under the Gambling Regulation Act 2024, any activity that constitutes betting requires a licence from the GRAI to operate.
This is legally significant and practically limited. The GRAI is correct that prediction markets, as currently structured, are betting activity by the functional definition the Act employs. The platforms arrange for one user to take the opposite side of another's position; money changes hands based on the outcome of a real-world event; the activity is designed to produce a financial return correlated with a prediction. That is betting.
But the first remote betting licences from the GRAI are not expected until 1 July 2026 at the earliest. No prediction market platform has applied for a GRAI licence — at least not publicly. And the GRAI's enforcement power, while meaningful on paper (fines up to €20 million, High Court orders to block access and payments), requires the regulator to identify, investigate, and pursue operators who are frequently domiciled in jurisdictions with no reciprocal enforcement relationship with Ireland.
Polymarket is incorporated in the United States and registered in the Seychelles. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated US entity. Neither has a presence in Ireland or has signalled any intent to seek an Irish licence. For Irish users of these platforms, the practical regulatory position in May 2026 is: the activity is technically unlicensed under Irish law, the platforms are under no enforceable Irish obligation, and the GRAI's capacity to act against them is not yet tested.
The Addiction Expert's Argument
Professor O'Gara's intervention on RTÉ was not primarily a legal argument. It was a clinical one. His framing of prediction markets as "the constant non-stop proliferation of the gambling product" reflects a specific concern in addiction medicine about the trajectory of gambling product development over the past decade: the gradual colonisation of everyday activity — sports, current events, politics, geopolitics — by the mechanics and rewards structure of betting.
The specific danger O'Gara identifies in prediction markets is what he called the "blurring" of gambling and intellectual engagement. Traditional sports betting has a clear product identity: you are gambling. Prediction markets present themselves as something adjacent — information markets, forecasting tools, mechanisms for aggregating distributed knowledge. The intellectual framing — the sense that you are not simply gambling but analysing, predicting, applying expertise — is, in O'Gara's reading, part of what makes the product potentially more addictive than straightforward casino gambling for a certain type of user. The harms, he noted, "are not necessarily very clear at the outset."
This aligns with a broader pattern that addiction researchers have documented across the evolution of gambling products. The most harmful formats tend to be those that combine rapid event resolution, continuous availability, and a perceived skill element. Fixed-odds sports betting became more harmful when it moved from shop counters to mobile phones and from match outcomes to in-play events resolved in minutes. Prediction markets replicate several of these structural features while adding the intellectual legitimacy of current affairs engagement.
Professor Whelan's academic framing of prediction markets as "a valuable data tool for economists" because their publicly available data produces useful information aggregation sits in direct tension with O'Gara's clinical concern — not because Whelan is wrong about the informational value, but because the same structural features that make prediction markets good information aggregators may make them risky products for people with gambling disorders.
The Products Themselves: What Irish Users Are Actually Accessing
Polymarket, the largest prediction market by volume, operates as a decentralised platform built on the Polygon blockchain. Users fund positions with USDC (a US dollar stablecoin) and trade on outcome contracts that resolve to 1 (if the event occurs) or 0 (if it does not). Markets in 2025 and 2026 have covered: US election outcomes, European election results, major sports events, geopolitical events including conflict escalation and ceasefire agreements, economic indicators like inflation readings and central bank decisions, and technology product launches.
The platform's appeal to Irish users is not difficult to understand. Irish public interest in US and European politics is high. The DART-like availability — accessible from a smartphone, resolving continuously, framed as informed analysis rather than gambling — positions it precisely in the segment of the market that the GRAI's new restrictions on loyalty schemes and credit card payments are designed to target.
Kalshi, the US-regulated alternative, markets itself explicitly as a financial exchange and has successfully argued in US courts that its event contracts fall under CFTC regulation rather than state gambling law. This jurisdictional arbitrage — the argument that prediction markets are financial instruments rather than gambling products — is the precise question that the GRAI will need to resolve through its own regulatory determination, absent any test case.
What the GRAI Has and Hasn't Said
The GRAI's April 2026 statement says two things clearly. First, that prediction markets bear the hallmarks of betting activity. Second, that operating betting activity without a GRAI licence is an offence under the Gambling Regulation Act 2024.
What it does not say is when or how the GRAI intends to act against unlicensed prediction market operators, what process it will use to determine whether a specific platform constitutes betting activity versus a financial instrument, or how it plans to address the enforcement gap created by the jurisdictional reality of these platforms.
The GRAI is a new regulator that formally began accepting licence applications in February 2026. Its first licences are not yet issued. Its enforcement capacity, while legally established, has not yet been tested against a major operator. In this context, the statement that prediction markets require a licence reads less as an immediate enforcement signal and more as a marker of regulatory intent — a staking of ground ahead of what will inevitably be a more protracted legal and regulatory process.
The Bigger Question
Prediction markets are the most visible current example of a broader regulatory challenge that the GRAI will face throughout its existence: the continuous development of new product categories that sit at the edge of existing definitions, move faster than legislative frameworks, and attract users who may not recognise the activity as gambling.
The Gambling Regulation Act 2024 was a genuine improvement on the 1931 Betting Act. It cannot anticipate every product that will emerge in the next decade. The GRAI's mandate includes research — it commissions and publishes research on gambling behaviour and harm — which is the correct institutional response to this problem. Understanding new product categories empirically, before the harm data accumulates in the clinical system, is the work that makes proactive regulation possible.
The clinical data on prediction markets and gambling harm is not yet at the scale where it forces the question. The platform uptake among Irish users is growing. The GRAI has flagged the issue. The licensing framework is not yet operational.
This is the regulatory gap that matters most in Irish gambling in 2026 — not because it is the biggest current source of harm, but because it is the clearest indicator of where the framework's limits are, and what the next phase of the debate will be about.