Check whether a casino holds an Irish or foreign licence

The Gambling Regulation Act 2024 set up the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland, the GRAI, and it is rolling out licences in phases rather than all at once. Each class of licence needs a commencement order signed by the Minister before the Authority can issue it.

So far the commenced classes are betting ones. The GRAI issues remote betting and remote betting intermediary licences, which cover online sportsbooks and exchanges, and in-person betting licences follow for shops as their older Revenue Commissioners licences run out.

Online casino games sit in a separate class.

Remote gaming licences, which would cover slots, roulette, blackjack and live casino, are in a later phase that the GRAI has said will open alongside lottery, B2B and charitable licences, and we found no commencement order for gaming licences when we checked. That matters for this guide in a practical way: until the GRAI issues gaming licences, no online casino can truthfully claim to be licensed by the Irish regulator, and any casino product you play from Ireland is licensed, if at all, by a regulator somewhere else.

A betting licence from the GRAI covers betting only. A bookmaker that also runs a casino tab is licensed in Ireland for the sportsbook, while the casino section still relies on whatever foreign licence the operator holds.

Licensed operators almost always put their licence details in the footer of the site, and the terms and conditions usually repeat them in the opening clauses. What you are looking for is three things together: the legal company name, the regulator that issued the licence, and a licence number.

A logo on its own proves nothing.

Brand names and company names differ more often than readers expect, because one licensed company commonly runs several brands, and the register lists the company with its trading names attached. The footer should therefore name a limited company, not only the brand, and the terms should say which company you are contracting with. If the footer shows a seal but no number, or a number but no regulator, treat the claim as unconfirmed until you have found it on the register yourself, since the seal image can be copied by anyone.

Where the seal links

Many regulators provide a seal that links to a verification page. Hover over it before clicking: the link should point at the regulator’s own domain, not at a page on the casino’s site.

A licence from Malta, Curaçao, Kahnawake or anywhere else can be entirely genuine and still offer you less than an Irish one would. The foreign regulator applies its own rules, and those rules were written for its own system rather than for Irish players.

Complaints are the clearest example. Under a foreign licence, a dispute over a withheld withdrawal goes to that regulator or a dispute body it approves, which means written correspondence in English with an office abroad and, in most cases, no route through the Irish courts that is quick or cheap.

Standards also vary widely between regulators. Some run detailed player protection codes and act on complaints, while others have historically offered little beyond the licence itself, and the gap between them is wider than the shared word licensed suggests.

KYC checks apply under almost every licence. Expect identity and address documents before a first withdrawal, and possibly a source-of-funds request for larger amounts, because anti-money-laundering rules require it whichever regulator is involved.

None of this makes a foreign licence worthless.

Most false claims are easy to spot once you know the pattern, because they rely on the reader never opening the register. The licence number leads nowhere, the company named in the footer is not the one on the register, or the seal links back to a page hosted by the casino itself.

Another sign is a mismatch between the terms and the footer.

If the terms name one company and one regulator while the footer names another, ask support in writing which licence governs your account, and keep the reply. An operator that cannot answer that plainly is unlikely to handle a withdrawal dispute any better, and you would have no record to show a regulator later.

Be wary too of sites offering credit card deposits to Irish customers while claiming Irish oversight, since the 2024 Act bans gambling on credit for GRAI licensees.

Once the gaming licence class is commenced and the first licences issued, the same register search will start to work for online casinos as it already does for betting. The GRAI publishes news of each new licence class on its site, and that announcement is the signal to watch for rather than any operator’s own press release.

Until that point, the honest position is simple: every online casino available in Ireland is licensed abroad or not at all.

That is not a reason to avoid casinos entirely, but it is a reason to read the foreign licence carefully, know which body would hear a complaint, and keep your own copies of terms and support replies.