Private enforcement in the UK and Ireland

Chapter 15 assesses the state of play of private enforcement in the UK and Ireland respectively. It surveys the first developments in private enforcement of competition law in the UK over the last 20 years. First, the chapter briefly reflects on legal and institutional developments over the twenty year period. Second, it provides a brief overview of the key case-law trends during that period. It assesses various mechanisms and levers to facilitate private enforcement in the UK and considers the extent to which the UK’s withdrawal from the EU may have negative repercussions on the role of the UK courts in providing an adequate system for effective competition law private redress in the UK. This part of the chapter concludes that the developed expertise and certainty in application of aspects of the rules by the judiciary, an increasingly (post-Merricks) effective collective damages recovery mechanism, and the availability of established third party funders in the UK may help to overcome increasingly strong competition from other legal systems in attracting significant international competition litigation. The second part of this chapter looks at Ireland. After presenting the key milestones in the evolution since 1991 of the apparently well-developed institutional framework for the private enforcement of competition law in Ireland, this part discusses the case-law to date in which litigants made procedural applications or sought remedies for substantive infringements of competition law. It then identifies some explanations for the comparatively low level of final determinations on substantive infringements in the Irish courts.