TONY O’REILLY’S GAMBLING habit began with a simple £1 bet on a football match when he was 24.

Twelve years later, he had stolen €1.75 million from An Post, where he worked as a branch manager in Gorey, to fund his gambling addiction.

Now he works as an addiction counsellor and aims to help people who suffer with problem gambling.

“I enjoy it, but it can be challenging,” he says of his new career path.

“We’re working in a space where it feels like we’re hitting our heads against the wall for the last ten years, with no legislation, regulation, and no proper funding for gambling services.

“I’ve seen so many other stories – maybe not with the [same] amount of zeros as mine – but so many other people have been devastated by this addiction.”

According to a report published by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) in October, one in thirty Irish adults have a gambling problem – a figure ten times higher than was found in previous research from 2019.

An additional 7.1% of adults, or 279,000 people, show moderate evidence of problem gambling.

Peter Jackson, the chief executive of Flutter (the company that owns Paddy Power), questioned the ESRI’s findings and asked whether gambling was as big a societal problem as the report suggested.

But the ESRI’s findings are stark, and the Government has sought to address the issue via a long-awaited Gambling Regulation Bill that is set to come into effect in the coming months.

Two-thirds of those who responded to the ESRI study with a gambling problem said they wanted to gamble less.

Launching the report last autumn, Fianna Fáil TD James Browne, who is Minister of State for Law Reform, said the ESRI’s findings were further evidence of a need for tighter regulations.

Highest gambling losses

Ireland ranks fourth in Europe for having the highest gambling losses, and fourteenth globally, according to figures from H2 Gambling Capital, a group of consultants who work within the industry.

Part of this has been put down to the country’s lax laws surrounding gambling.

The Gambling Regulation Bill aims to regulate this by setting out the framework for the establishment of a new independent, statutory regulatory body, the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland (GRAI).

The regulator would oversee in-person and online gambling, and the legislation will impose tighter restrictions on gambling advertising, websites and apps.

The Department of Justice says that the bill is a public health measure “aimed at protecting our citizens from gambling harm, including younger people and those more vulnerable in our communities”.

“Once enacted, the Bill will provide the Authority with the necessary enforcement powers for licensing and enable it to take appropriate and focused action where providers are failing to comply with the provisions of this bill and with the Authority’s licensing terms, conditions and regulations,” a statement said.

Tony O’Reilly feels that the legislation is “well overdue”, and is optimistic about its potential impact on gambling culture in Ireland.

“There’s lots of things that they’re bringing in that will have a really positive impact on stopping people from developing addictions and also shining the light on the fact that it is a real addiction,” he said.

He highlights plans to clamp down on advertising and offering free bets, as outlined in the legislation, saying this will make a big difference to problem gamblers.

Another feature, a proposed self-exclusion register, would allow people to prohibit themselves from betting with any online gambling operator licensed to operate in Ireland.

However, O’Reilly cautions that this would only apply online.

“The one thing is that there’s little or no procedures in place for self-exclusion in the physical bookies,” O’Reilly says.

“The person still has to go in and physically do it themselves, where it should be across the board.”

He also addresses potential critics who might suggest that the legislation is going too far: “I think the legislation won’t impact anyone who doesn’t have a problem with gambling.”

‘Household names’

The introduction of a regulator with specific oversight of the gambling industry is likewise seen as a positive move by Barry Grant, Project Manager and addiction counsellor at Extern Problem Gambling.

He points to the UK’s annual Safer Gambling Week, which took place from 13-19 November last year, as an example of the power that regulators can have.

“In the year since last year’s Safer Gambling Week, the UK regulator had handed out £44 million in fines, because many of the gambling companies who are licensed to operate in the UK are not doing what they’re supposed to be doing and not behaving appropriately,” he says.

“Many of those same operators are also currently licensed to operate in Ireland with no oversight and no regulation.

“Many of the companies who received massive fines in the UK are household names here.”

When Grant began working as an addiction counsellor twelve years ago, online gambling was not as widespread; now he believes it is a “whole other animal”, particularly because of how easy it is to access compared to gambling in person.

“[With physical bookies], that time between having the impulse to bet or the impulse to gamble and actually physically being able to do it is much longer, which means it gives people more time to think about the consequences of doing that,” he explains.

“Gambling operators can offer you freebies at all times of the day or night to incentivise people to keep gambling as well. So online is a game changer.

“People have always been addicted to gambling – a certain percentage of the population – but online is just gambling addiction on steroids.”

Industry concerns

Gambling companies and others associated with the horse racing industry have warned that the Government’s gambling legislation could impact their businesses.

One industry source told The Journal that while their organisation supported the upcoming legislation, they had a few key concerns about it.

“We’re very much in favour of regulation,” they said.

“I think it’s not always recognised that big established brands aren’t necessarily opposed to regulation; that might seem counterintuitive, but it’s not. We’ve been fully supportive of the Irish Gambling Regulation Bill.”

However, the source said that Irish gambling operators are contesting certain elements of the wording of the bill.

These include areas in relation to staking limits (the amount that a person can bet), inducement (offers given to potential gamblers to encourage them to bet), and advertising.

The legislation currently aims to impose a €10 staking limit, which would mean that someone can no longer place a bet over that amount on certain games, and a €3,000 limit for bonuses or winnings.

The industry source claimed that this is not practical for low-stake games such as bingo, where punters can currently place bets under €1, or higher stake games like poker or roulette, where winnings can be much higher than €3,000.

“We don’t disagree that there should be limits on certain games and for certain people, but just hardwiring it into the legislation at those very clearly defined numbers will create issues,” they said.

Of inducement, which takes the form of free bets and promotions, the source said: “We completely agree with any legislation or regulation that will look to try and reduce the amount of inducements that would be directed towards people that potentially have an issue.

“We would never actively try and advertise to someone who is self-excluded from gambling, for example.

“But we are a business that does rely on retaining customers, and part of any business is being able to provide offers […] Removing all promotions and offers basically means you just have a very homogenised product, and there’s very little way of distinguishing yourselves from competitors.”

The legislation would also restrict advertising on gambling between the hours of 5.30am and 9pm. Gambling operators across Ireland, as well as representatives for the Irish horse racing industry, have expressed serious concern on how this advertising restriction will affect horse racing in Ireland.

Racing TV and Sky Sports Racing, two television companies who broadcast horse racing, warned that the bill would leave their operations “economically unviable” in Ireland.

There have also been claims that this would have a knock-on effect for revenues for tracks where races are held.

Barry Gibson, chairman of Ladbrokes’ bookmakers owner, Entain, is another who has warned about proposed advertising restrictions, telling the Irish Times that “you have to be careful not to legislate [the industry] out of existence”.

The Irish horse racing industry claims that it supports the equivalent of 30,000 full-time jobs in Ireland, and that it brings in around €2.46 billion in revenue a year.

But the industry source we spoke to suggested that horse racing is still struggling in some ways. 

“It’s a sport that is already shrinking in terms of viewership because young people aren’t getting switched on to horse racing in the same way that they are with other sports,” they said.

“So it’s a worry for Irish racing if the industry themselves can’t support it due to regulation.”

Raffles

Industry experts are not the only ones to be concerned about the proposed legislation.

The CEO of Charities Institute Ireland, Aine Myler, has said the group is worried that the categorisation of raffles and lotteries as gambling activity within the legislation could severely inhibit fundraising opportunities across the country.

“They didn’t really consider the scale of fundraising income that comes through those types of channels,” she said.

The group surveyed members to estimate the potential loss of income, with the projected loss placed at €150,000 a year.

Myler believes that charity fundraising should not be placed in the same category as betting, as it has “very few motivational factors and disappears nearly completely off the Gambling Harm Index”.

“There’s people out there who run algorithms on these things, and it’s like a business to them, but that doesn’t happen at charities,” she said.

However, the group has said is fully supports the legislation and that it will do what it can to reduce gambling harm, even if they believe aspects of the bill need revising.

The final Gambling Regulation Bill 2022 is expected to come into effect this year, though no date has yet been announced.

Experts on gambling addiction as well as recovered addicts have hope that it will improve Ireland’s gambling culture and protect vulnerable members of Irish society.

Once appropriate services and regulations are in place, experts believe that improvements will be seen over time – though when the regulations will be enacted is still up in the air.

Tony O’Reilly is cautiously optimistic when considering the wider impact that the legislation will have.

“Gambling has its place in society…it’s not going away anywhere,” he says.

“But I suppose we do need to have more awareness around it, in the same way as we talk about drugs, alcohol, smoking.

“We don’t want to look back to gambling in 10 years’ time and say, ‘why did we let it get as far as we did?’

“Once the regulators start being able to give out proper funding to different organisations, the more conversations [that will] start around gambling, and I think that will be the biggest impact.”