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.