A Law With Real Teeth, and a Communications Problem
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has been in force in Ireland for just over a year, transposed via the European Union (Accessibility Requirements of Products and Services) Regulations 2023 (S.I. No. 636 of 2023) and applicable from June 28, 2025. In a June 30, 2026 op-ed, Nexus Inclusion CEO Kyran O'Mahoney argues Irish compliance is still largely a checkbox exercise — and cites a striking data point: roughly half of Irish businesses remain unaware the requirements apply to them (itbrief.ie). That figure is not new. Digital Business Ireland found nearly the same share unaware in a survey reported the week the law took effect in June 2025 (RTÉ). A year of enforcement authority has apparently not moved the needle on awareness at all.
What the Law Actually Covers
The EAA is not a vague aspiration — it is a detailed, sector-mapped compliance regime. Ireland split enforcement across six bodies: the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) for e-commerce, e-books, computer hardware and payment terminals; ComReg for electronic communications and 112 emergency access; the Central Bank of Ireland for consumer banking; the National Transport Authority (NTA) and Irish Aviation Authority for passenger transport; and Coimisiún na Meán for audiovisual media. The National Disability Authority (NDA) sits above all of them in an advisory capacity (nda.ie). Microenterprises — fewer than 10 staff, turnover or balance sheet under €2 million — are exempt from the services requirements, though not from product-side obligations.
Steelmanning the Law
O'Mahoney's underlying case is a strong one and deserves to be stated plainly before it's contested. Roughly 22% of Ireland's population lives with a disability, by his own citation, yet Irish websites average an accessibility score of just 55.2%, in a global context where 96% of the world's top one million sites fail basic accessibility checks (Silicon Republic). That is a real, quantifiable addressable market being excluded by design choices, not by necessity. And a single harmonized EU accessibility standard is, in principle, exactly the kind of regulation innovation-friendly critics should welcome: it replaces the prospect of 27 divergent national accessibility regimes — a genuine cross-border compliance nightmare for any Irish firm scaling into the EU single market — with one baseline. Businesses that build accessible products for Ireland get EU-wide compliance for free.
The Public Sector Is Proving the Model Works
O'Mahoney's op-ed points to a genuine bright spot: the Central Bank and the National Transport Authority are now embedding accessibility criteria directly into procurement, and Fáilte Ireland has folded digital accessibility into its Digital That Delivers programme. This is what accessibility-by-design looks like when it's built into the buying process rather than retrofitted for an audit — and it's the template the private sector needs, not another statute.
Where the Regulatory Design Falls Short
The steelman doesn't excuse the enforcement architecture Ireland chose. Ireland is the only EU member state that paired the EAA with criminal liability: summary conviction carries fines up to €5,000 or six months' imprisonment; conviction on indictment rises to €60,000 or 18 months, applicable to both companies and individual officers (Mason Hayes & Curran). A due-diligence defence exists on paper, but criminal exposure is a blunt instrument to point at a market where half the affected businesses don't yet know the rule exists. That is not a case for weakening the substantive accessibility requirements — it's a case that Ireland picked the wrong lever to drive compliance. Deterrence only works on people who know the rule; against a population unaware of it, criminal penalties mostly generate downside risk for firms too small to have a compliance function, while doing nothing to actually improve accessibility outcomes.
The Proportionate Path
CCPC has said it will take "a proportionate approach" and has published microenterprise guidance (ccpc.ie) — the right instinct, but goodwill from one regulator doesn't fix a national communications failure, nor does it neutralise the criminal exposure sitting in the statute book regardless of how CCPC chooses to use it today. The fix is not O'Mahoney's proposed next step — a broader "Digital Inclusion Act" — before the current one has even been explained to the market it governs. It's targeted: fund the grants Digital Business Ireland has been requesting since before the law even commenced, run a real outreach campaign modelled on the procurement-embedding approach the Central Bank and NTA have already proven internally, and consider whether Ireland's criminal-penalty outlier status is buying any additional compliance the other 26 member states aren't already getting with civil fines alone. A law that half its regulated population doesn't know about isn't a compliance failure on business's part — it's a rollout failure on the state's.