Ireland continues to sit at the centre of European GDPR enforcement, largely because many major technology companies have their European headquarters there. An Irish Legal News report, drawing on DLA Piper’s latest enforcement survey, highlights Ireland’s prominent role in the European enforcement landscape and its ongoing relevance to high-profile cross-border cases.
This position is structural rather than incidental. Under the GDPR’s “one-stop-shop” mechanism, the lead supervisory authority for cross-border processing is typically the regulator where the relevant main establishment is located. In practice, that means the Irish Data Protection Commission often acts as lead regulator for multinational platforms and large digital services operating across the EU. The result is heightened scrutiny of Irish enforcement outcomes — not just locally, but across Europe.
The practical takeaway for organisations is that enforcement risk is increasingly shaped by jurisdictional realities. Where you place operational control, how you define your main establishment, and where your decision-making functions are genuinely located can affect the regulator that leads your cross-border cases. At the same time, cross-border cases remain inherently collaborative: other concerned supervisory authorities have formal rights to input and to challenge draft decisions, so outcomes are rarely “single-regulator” decisions in any meaningful sense.
For Irish-based teams, the reputational impact is also material. Irish enforcement decisions often travel quickly through European professional networks and press coverage. That amplifies the value of preventative work: controls that reduce breach likelihood, careful design of consent and transparency layers, and disciplined vendor governance.
Acompli perspective: For organisations operating in Ireland with EU reach, it is worth treating cross-border defensibility as a design requirement. That means a DPIA approach that is repeatable, evidence-driven, and aligned with how the organisation actually operates — not a purely legal exercise. Where enforcement visibility is high, strong documentation and change control are not “overhead”; they are operational resilience.