Assessing Irish Merger Control: How a Small National Competition Authority Can Make a Big Impact

Ireland is an increasingly interesting and prominent jurisdiction in merger control, both from a European and international perspective. Due to the level of multinational corporate investment into the country (particularly in digital and pharmaceutical industries), Ireland has a somewhat disproportionate level of importance when compared to other jurisdictions of a similar size in the EU. In addition, the Irish competition authority, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (‘CCPC’), has recently been granted several additional powers when reviewing mergers. Further, it appears to be adopting a more aggressive and interventionist stance, for example, by taking the previously unusual step of prohibiting a number of transactions and requiring extensive remedies across several cases. Alongside the changes in Irish merger control, the EU Commission is faced with the resurrected challenge of below-threshold mergers as a result of the Court of Justice of the EU’s (‘CJEU’) judgment in Illumina v. Commission. This decision has scuppered its ability to rely on Article 22 of the EU Merger Regulation (‘EUMR’) to access problematic acquisitions in digital and pharmaceutical markets. As a result, there is a strong possibility that national competition authorities (‘NCAs’) with the ability to ‘call-in’ transactions that fall outside the EU’s notification thresholds may be required to do so to plug this gap that has re-emerged in European merger control. In this context, with Ireland positioned as an extremely important corporate hub and the CCPC likely to be faced with an expanding mandate over the coming years, this article offers a timely review of the Irish authority’s activities over the past five years as a means of synthesizing trends that can be observed (as well as potential future developments). It does so by tracing through the assessments of mergers systematically over this period (2020–24) from their initiation by way of notification to the CCPC, all the way through to determinations, remedies, and prohibitions. By taking this approach, the article extracts information and points of interest from the various stages as a means of shaping merger parties’ expectations of the process, as well as providing key advice for other NCAs in the EU.