On 10 June 2026, Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke signed a ministerial order raising the turnover thresholds that force companies to notify a merger to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC). From 1 July 2026, a deal must be notified only if the parties' combined Irish turnover reaches €100 million and at least two of them each turn over €15 million — up from €60 million and €10 million. It is the first increase since 2019, and it was made under Section 27 of the Competition Act 2002, which lets the Minister adjust the figures by order.
This is exactly the kind of unglamorous regulatory housekeeping that deserves more attention than it gets. It is a textbook case of a regulator and a government rightsizing a control regime to the harm it is meant to catch — without surrendering the power to act when a genuinely worrying small deal comes along.
The case for keeping thresholds low
Start with the strongest argument against this change. Mandatory notification thresholds based on turnover are a blunt instrument, and the most competitively dangerous acquisitions in tech are often the cheapest: an incumbent buying a fast-growing startup with little revenue but a product that could one day challenge it — the so-called killer acquisition. Raise the bar and, in principle, you let more of those slip through unreviewed. A regulator that wants to police digital markets has a real interest in seeing as many deals as possible.
That concern is legitimate. But it is also precisely the gap the CCPC already closed three years ago — which is what makes this threshold increase safe rather than reckless.
Why the call-in power changes the calculus
Since the Competition (Amendment) Act 2022 commenced on 27 September 2023, the CCPC has held a discretionary 'call-in' power. It can direct the parties to any below-threshold transaction to notify it, where it considers the deal 'may have an effect on competition in markets for goods or services in the State.' The notice must issue within 60 working days of the deal being announced, agreed, or completed, and ignoring it is a criminal offence carrying fines up to €250,000 on indictment.
Crucially, Burke's order leaves that power completely untouched. The government's consultation was explicit that raising the thresholds 'would not curtail the CCPC's ability to intervene in potentially problematic transactions below those thresholds.'
This is the heart of why the reform is well-designed. Ireland has decoupled two things that older regimes bundle together: the mandatory, automatic net that catches deals purely by size, and the targeted, discretionary net that catches deals by competitive risk. The first is being loosened because size is a poor proxy for harm. The second — the one that actually catches killer acquisitions — stays exactly as strong as it was. And the CCPC has shown it will use it: on 20 March 2026 it exercised the call-in power for the first time, directing notification of pharmaceutical wholesaler Uniphar's acquisition of pharmacy-software firm TouchStore, a deal that fell below the mandatory thresholds.
Proportionality in numbers
The burden being lifted is real, not theoretical. CCPC notifications have climbed back to 90 last year, up from 47 in 2019 — the year the last threshold rise temporarily cut the caseload roughly in half. Inflation explains much of the drift: a €60 million bar set in 2019 captures far more deals in 2026 simply because the same businesses now invoice more euros. As CCPC member Geoffrey Gray put it, inflation 'has meant that some deals now need to be notified that didn't before, increasing regulatory burden on businesses.'
Every one of those mandatory filings carries a cost — legal fees, deal delay, management time — that falls hardest on exactly the companies Ireland's tech economy depends on: scaling indigenous firms and the acquirers that give startup founders an exit. Galway's growing cluster of indigenous scale-ups, anchored by names like HPE, Cisco and Genesys, is the kind of ecosystem where a lighter notification load for genuinely small transactions translates directly into faster, cheaper deals. Forcing a routine €65 million combination through a standstill review delivers no competition benefit; it is pure deadweight loss.
A model worth exporting
The deeper lesson is about regulatory design philosophy. Too often the choice is framed as more enforcement versus less. Ireland's reform shows a better axis: precision. By raising the automatic threshold while retaining a sharp discretionary call-in, the CCPC concentrates its finite resources on the high-value, high-risk mergers most likely to harm consumers, and stops taxing the harmless ones. That is what proportionate, evidence-based competition policy looks like.
There are caveats. A discretionary power is only as good as the regulator's intelligence about deals it is not told about, and the CCPC will need to monitor the digital sector actively to spot below-threshold acquisitions worth calling in. The Uniphar precedent suggests it intends to. The government has also promised a full report on the consultation submissions 'in the coming weeks,' which will reveal how carefully the €100 million figure was calibrated.
But the structure is right. Free the many small deals that pose no risk; keep a credible, criminally-enforced power to reach into the few small deals that do. Other jurisdictions wrestling with the same inflation-driven over-notification problem — and with the killer-acquisition fear that keeps them from acting — should study how Dublin squared the circle.