Ireland's broker market has spent the past few years being bought up. FTI Consulting counted nine broker acquisitions in 2020 and 30 in 2024, most of them involving private equity-backed groups. The pace has since cooled, with broker deals across the UK and Ireland down by around a third in 2025. For the groups that have already bought, the question has moved on from what to acquire to how to make it all run as one business.
Gallagher is in the middle of that shift. Since entering Ireland in 2022, it has grown through acquisitions including Innovu, First Ireland and the Irish arm of AssuredPartners. Derek Henry (pictured), appointed CEO of Gallagher's Irish broking business in September, said the job now is joining those firms into one Gallagher business.
"You need people that are going to get on with each other. Otherwise, you've got the devil's own job of bringing them together, because if they're really that different, you wouldn't do it," Henry said. "We walk past M&A where we don't think it's culturally aligned."
If the people get on, he said, what's left is organising around the best of what each firm brings, and in Ireland each has arrived with its own specialism.
Every acquired broker tells its clients nothing will change. Henry said the part that shouldn't is the people.
"We're buying the brokers that look after their clients. That's what we want," he said.
What does shift is what sits behind them. Acquired teams gain access to group reinsurance and alternative risk specialists, many of them based in Dublin, and to group systems and tools as firms are brought onto them. Henry said that is where clients feel the difference, particularly when a risk profile changes and needs a different structure.
For owners weighing offers, he said the question to ask is what happens to their people and clients afterwards and argued that Gallagher won't be sold on to someone with a different view later. The distinction carries weight in a market where, as law firm A&L Goodbody noted in its review of 2024 deals, much of the consolidation has been driven by private equity-backed buyers looking to add value before selling on.
For anyone comparing the Irish market with the UK, "there's a danger in assuming just because everyone speaks the same language, it's the same," Henry said.
The difference is cultural, he said, and sport is one of the clearest examples. The GAA dominates conversation nationally, rugby matters enormously in some regions, and the way families and communities come together around sport is different to the UK.
For buyers, the cultural point does not end once a deal is done. Henry said the people stay the same after an acquisition because they are what Gallagher is buying, and in Irish broking those relationships tend to be local and bound up in the same community life. A buyer that treats Ireland as a smaller version of the UK risks unsettling the very people and clients it paid for.
Getting that right is likely to be the test for every acquirer that has piled into Irish broking over the past five years. Buying family-run brokers has been the visible part of the story. Turning them into a single business without losing the local relationships that made them worth buying is the part that will separate the long-term owners from the rest.
