Best Irish new online casino sites for 2024

There are so many things to consider, and so many options to choose from. At the moment, the Gambling Commission has issued licenses to at least 175 online casinos that are available to customers in Ireland. More are constantly popping up, so the big question is how do you choose one that’s right for you?

There are naturally a lot of things to consider. Today, we’re going to break down all the key things you need to look for in new online casinos. We’ll thoroughly analyse what makes a site advantageous, what you might want to stay away from, and the most important basic features to look for.

Read on to get started.

What to look for in a new online casino

Let’s start with the basics. There are a huge number of variable factors and features on any given online casino. Trying to choose based on everything can be overwhelming to say the least when you’re first getting started. So, here are some of the basic things you’ll want to check when you’re assessing how suitable an online casino is.

Security

As any experienced online bettor will tell you, the single most important thing about any online platform is security. When so many legitimate casinos are popping up, it’s easy for less than reputable platforms to slip through the gaps. Online scams are rampant, with around £2.3bn being lost in 2021 alone to such scams.

So, first and foremost, you need to know that the platform you’re signing up for is secure. Cyber attacks are more common than ever now, with these criminals most often looking for the new digital gold: data. With the kinds of sensitive information you’re going to have to entrust the online casino with, you need to be sure their security.

There are a few ways you can assess how secure an online casino is, but the first and most important is to just go and check that they are licensed by the UK Gambling Commission or the Commission in Malta or Gibraltar. Any online casino without such a license cannot legally accept players in Ireland, and without a license they are likely out to get one up on you.

Once you’ve established they’re licensed, there are a few other good security features you can look out for. 2FA, or 2-factor authentication, is one of the most secure ways to log into to any online platform—when it comes to something like an online casino where you will store personal financial data, you want every line of defence you can get. Data breaches are becoming more and more common, with nearly 1,300 major data breaches in 2021—up almost 200 from the previous year.

Payment methods

With security in mind, then, let’s look at payment methods. You obviously want to be sure that the casino you’re using has robust security. Part of that security is what payment methods are available on the platform. Withdrawals and deposits are facilitated by a number of different methods across different platforms, so you should first of all make sure they offer a method that works for you.

The most common and secure are things like VISA, MasterCard and PayPal. There are a number of others designed specifically for casinos, such as Paysafecard and Neteller.

Check to see that the methods offered work for you before signing up.

User-friendliness

If you bet a lot, then you’re going to be spending a lot of time navigating the online casino you choose. Though it might not be the first thing that comes to mind, you should spend some time navigating around the online casino and seeing how it works on a basic level.

Think about the loading times—are they quick enough? Does it often freeze, or stop working entirely? Is it simple and quick to change between games?

One thing that we can say for sure of online casino apps and websites is that there is a huge variety in terms of quality. It’s really best to be sure that you aren’t going to get frustrated by a slow app when choosing an online casino.

So, these are some of the most important basic things you’ll want to look out for when choosing a new online casino. There are of course other factors to consider, like the variety of games offered and how attractive the welcome bonus is. But those, I think, should be secondary to being sure the site is secure, safe and functional.

Mobile vs Browser casinos

Online casinos were the first and very natural development of casinos into the world of the internet. They have been around for a long time, though they are still of course developing. These are casinos that you access primarily or exclusively through a web browser.

The other option you have now is mobile applications that you can easily use on your smartphone. Browser casinos can, of course, be used on your phone, but far less efficiently and smoothly. Of the 175 licensed online casinos in the U.K., around 50 are mobile apps or have a partner app.

So, deciding whether you want to pursue an app or a browser platform, or one that manages to do both, is a key part of choosing an online casino.

If you want to be able to access your casino anywhere, then an app on a smartphone is likely the best choice for you. More and more the world is becoming app and smartphone driven—projections estimate that by 2025, almost 65 million people in the U.K. will be using a smartphone.

You might tend to assume most popular browser online casinos have a partner app, but this is not always the case. Many will focus their efforts only on their main site.

However, if you want to future proof your online casino experience, looking for apps is the way to go in my opinion. Especially when it comes to new online casinos. Apps and smart devices will be how things go forward, and new and developing apps will be in a stronger position in the future.

That said, there are still lots of advantages to browser casinos. For many, it is a way of self-limitation. Having a casino in your pocket at all times might be too great a temptation for you—in this case, you may be best leaving your online betting to the desktop computer at home.

In any case, whether a new online casino is exclusively an app or a browser will play a role in your decision, so it’s worth thinking about.

The best new online casinos:

Old casinos vs new casinos

So, perhaps the big question we’re getting to here is why you might want to look at new and emerging online casinos rather than old and well-established ones. Well, there are again clear advantages and drawbacks to both, but let’s think about what the main things are which distinguish newer and well-established casinos.

The most obvious and important is reputation. An online casinos reputation will tell you most of what you need to know about it—there’s no more reliable source of reviews than other users. Established casinos have this advantage, and you can be all but certain that you’ll get a good experience if you find a well-reviewed site.

New casinos are a bit more of gamble. You don’t always know what you’re getting into, but something most people don’t know is that the majority of these casinos are developed by only a handful of companies. Big names like NuxGame, Microgaming, Playtech and Evolution Gaming don’t just develop software for one or two platforms, or make a few online games—they are always working on new sites and apps. Around 90% of online casinos have one a handful of major developers working on their games.

Newer developers, though, have their advantages too. On a design level, they are going to be looking to shake things up and make a more interesting casino. Certainly, one of the issues with the saturation of online casinos in the market is that the games can start to blend into one another and become repetitive. Smaller, newer developers like Yggdrasil are great examples of this.  

So, though you can’t look through large numbers of user reviews for new online casinos, you can check who developed the software and games, who publishes it, and who in general is behind the casino—there will usually be more than one organisation.

All that said, well known and well-established online casinos are still worth your consideration. Just keep in mind that there are ways, beyond actually trying the app, to determine how good a new and emerging online casino is. And, beyond that, established casinos have a strong customer base—new ones will need a way to get their foot in the door, and one of the ways they do this is by increasingly attractive welcome offers, bonuses and promotions.

Welcome offers, bonuses, promotions

Without doubt one of the most tangible and easy ways to distinguish new online casinos is the attractiveness of their welcome offers, and of bonuses and promotions moving forward. Competition is the name of the game—with so many online casinos springing up, the new ones need to get their foot in the door and the old ones need to keep up with what the new ones are doing.

Often, the newer it is, the better time it is to get on to an online casino. At first, they may offer an exceptionally good welcome bonus to attract many new customers, before curtailing that offer for something more profitable later on. Established casinos will have welcome offers, and indeed very attractive offers, but they’re unlikely to be this good.

In any case, whenever you’re looking at a new casino, you will need to consider how good their welcome offers are. They will usually take the form of deposit bonus, meaning you’ll have to deposit some actual funds before you get access to the bonus.

You can also get free spins on the casino’s games, and some even offer no deposit bonuses. This means you can play totally risk-free, and this is a great way for online casinos to attract long-term players.

As I was saying earlier, choosing between mobile apps and browser sites comes down to a number of different factors. However, many of these online casinos even run mobile only bonuses, meaning you have to access the casino via mobile to access these bonuses.

Beyond that, any decent online casino should run fairly regular promotions of some kind—whether they’re tied to specific events or days of the week, these regular promotions are a great way to increase your winnings.

Promotions and bonuses are often one of the most contested areas of the world of online casinos, and you could be limiting your winnings by not looking out for them.

Where are online casinos headed?

So, with all this information in mind, then, what can we expect to see from new online casinos in the coming years? The trends of the industry have been fascinating to watch, and an online casino from only a few years ago becomes clunky and unrecognisable so quickly. Competition is the strongest driving factor in this change, and this is often true of many online platforms. Unlike physical casinos, location and indeed starting capital are much less of an issue.

One thing that we are certainly going to see a lot more of is gamification. What we have seen even with non-money mobile games is that people do enjoy building up objectives, trophies, completing tasks and doing levels. Even for online casinos, people like their mobile experience to feel rewarding and like a game, rather than just a bet. This gamification will, naturally, be further driven by greater promotions and bonuses in the future. Tournaments, interchangeable offers—all of these new innovations are where the industry is headed.

On a tech level, we are going to see everything getting faster and faster. Processors are getting more and more efficient, and we can increasingly fit more and more memory into smaller and smaller devices. Online casinos, with this in mind, are going to get more complex, banking is going to be faster and the overall experience will eventually be completely seamless, even for those without high end mobile devices or computers.

The ‘remote’ betting market alone was worth £3.1bn in 2020. This includes online casinos. We can only expect this figure to grow in the meantime, further increasing the competition between the existing platforms.

But what we are also going to see is higher and higher levels of regulation. Recently, a variety of new regulations have been brought in for online betting to try to curb the issue of problem gambling. For example, any online casino must now clearly show the player’s total losses and wins during online slots games. The Gambling Commission also banned reverse withdrawals, meaning players can no longer bet money they have already asked to withdraw. A lot of data suggested this action with remove a lot of risk of continuing gambling past a player’s budget.

Credit cards, furthermore, have been banned from use in any online gambling. Debt is one of the biggest problems with online gambling, and estimates suggest that the harms and losses associated with problem gambling cost the U.K. population around £1.27bn in 2019-20.

So, while we are going to continue to see enormous growth in the sector, it is also important to consider how we can mitigate the more negative impacts of online betting. While physical, in-person betting has an equal number of potential problems, the thing about online casinos is that they are so readily and easily accessible. Regulating that is a never-ending task, since the casinos themselves are constantly evolving.

What we can say for sure, though, is that new online casinos in the coming years are going to have huge advantages over their past competition. As the industry is more heavily regulated, new features are bought in, computer components made faster and more reliable, these games will become more and more user-friendly and safer to use.

What you need to do is get to grips with the basic building blocks that I’ve talked about here, and then start to decide what it is you want out of your online casino. As I said, with nearly 200 licensed online casinos out there, there will be one that has what you need.