The betting free-for-all threatening to destroy lives across the country
How online bookmakers, with star endorsements and powerful apps, are luring a generation of punters into gambling – and potential ruin
AS Pádraig Bannon left work for the day, two gardaí were waiting outside for him. The young retail worker wasn’t shocked. He knew this moment would come. The worry had been keeping him awake at night.
For months, he had been stealing money from his employer – €5,000 in total – to fund a gambling problem which spiralled rapidly out of control through easy online betting sites.
He recalls: ‘I sat in the Garda station and thought, “This is me out, I’m stopping this here. If I don’t, what’s next?” I told them everything.’
Like many compulsive gamblers, Bannon got help because he had reached crisis point, not because he wanted it.
He was prosecuted, but having re-paid the money and undergone a four-week residential treatment programme at Aiséirí in Wexford, he avoided jail and was given the Probation Act. His case ended just five weeks ago.
Pádraig started gambling at 18, going to the local bookies with friends on a Saturday morning before heading to the pub. It was accepted practice in his GAA circle of pals, a rite of passage almost. Before long, the keen footballer had started using online betting sites in conjunction with visits to the bookies. He recalls: ‘The thing about my online gambling was the ease and speed of it.
‘Online betting is 24/7, 365 days a year, the shutters never come down. My gambling was intense. Traditionally someone might see a gradual increase in their gambling problem – mine took three years. Once I started gambling online, I was hooked straight away.
‘I wasn’t gambling much money at the start, but the free bets offered online were a big hook, enticing me to play more. I had online accounts with most of the major operators just to get the offers. Also, once I registered online, my card details were stored. It was extremely easy to place bets.
‘Even in the bookies, I’d be betting on the phone. I’d place smaller bets over the counter so that it looked normal but would bet much larger amounts on the phone.
‘The bookies had all angles covered – there was a card that I could use in the shop which allowed me to use funds from my online account.’
ACAFÉ worker, Pádraig wasn’t gambling large sums of money but was gambling beyond his means. ‘I was always known as a bit of a charmer,’ says the 25-yearold. ‘But now I was being manipulative, taking advantage of people, borrowing money that I had no intention of paying back. I became a compulsive liar, anything to get my hands on money to gamble. I always had an excuse for having no money and always managed to get hold of more, and the debt just got bigger and bigger.’
Pádraig, who is now training as a fitness instructor, says it became all-consuming. ‘I was never off the phone,’ he recalls. ‘I spent hours at night studying form and checking odds for the next day.
‘I never slept properly and didn’t eat properly. I was always either in the bookies or on the mobile; it took over every part of my life.’
As a young GAA club player, Pádraig wasn’t alone with his gambling problem.
In February, the GAA voted overwhelmingly to remove gambling sponsorship from the sport – from in-stadium to ads for gear. The sport was ‘besieged by gambling’, a conference heard, and 77 intercounty players had presented with gambling problems in a 12-month period – half of them for online gambling issues.
Pádraig’s story will feature in Baz Ashmawy’s All Bets Are Off programme, which examines gambling in Ireland and will air on RTÉ One on Monday evening. But the reality is that all bets are very much on in this country in 2018. Pádraig Bannon is a statistic in an epidemic of online gambling, a ticking time bomb which experts say is hidden in homes throughout the country with no regulation to control it.
The gambling industry in Ireland enjoys a turnover of €5.3billion a year. From just over 3% of the market in 2003, online gambling now accounts for almost 50% of all Irish betting revenue. After payouts and a 1% tax on betting turnover, pure profit from online betting here is more than €1billion a year.
And the Irish are big losers. In fact, figures from H2GC, a prominent gambling industry analysis firm, show that Ireland’s online gambling losses are the biggest in the world per person, while our overall gambling losses are the third highest worldwide, trailing behind Australia and Singapore. We spend €479 per person a year on gambling.
BUT there are facts even more terrifying than these figures. Gambling in this country is still governed by legislation dating back to the 1930s and 1950s. The Government has dragged its heels on passing the 2013 Gambling Control Bill drafted by Alan Shatter, and shelved a planned gambling prevalence study in 2015. In the context of upgrading the Bill, a review was undertaken by the Department of Justice and Equality in 2017.
A working group has since been established with the intention of submitting a final report to Government before the end of this year. Some 0.5
to 1% of the Irish population are estimated to suffer from chronic gambling problems but some, including MEP Lynn Boylan, believe the figure could be closer to 3%, as in Northern Ireland.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fáil TD Jack Chambers, who has worked with party colleagues Anne Rabbitte and Jim O’Callaghan to push the Gambling Control 2018 Bill through the first stage in Leinster House, wants to see strict regulations introduced to control online gambling here.
‘Treatment centres like the Rutland have seen a threefold increase in online gambling referrals in the past year. This is very much a hidden problem in Irish society,’ he says. ‘I want to see restriction of betting ads – which can be relentless during televised sporting events – and a break in the link between sport and gambling sponsorship. We also need total separation between regulation and the industry.
‘One of the reasons that we can’t grasp the scale of the problem is that there is no oversight – I want to see that oversight in an industry currently operating in anarchy. It’s ridiculous that gambling is still governed by archaic legislation, drafted in an era when people couldn’t foresee the internet, never mind online gambling. The Government has an obligation to provide the framework for a modern licensing and regulatory regime.’
In the UK, the Gambling Commission has the power to impose multi-million-pound fines against operators in breach of online player protection rules. A number of ground-breaking fines handed out to high-profile operators punished them for continuing to offer gambling access to players who had chosen to self-exclude or continued to send out promotional emails to those players.
Self-exclusion – where a gambler asks a betting operator to exclude them in shops and online – is one of the options available to gamblers struggling with addiction. Companies such as Paddy Power and BoyleSports also offer timeout options and daily deposit limits, but these are on a voluntary basis and are of little use to addicted gamblers.
According to BoyleSports, its mobile software looks for unusual gambling patterns which may indicate that a customer has a problem and offers a link to a 24-hour industry-funded helpline.
‘Operators have been calling for regulation for years,’ says Sharon Byrne from the Irish Bookmakers Association. ‘But they want it in a way that is fair and establishes a level playing field for all. There are many options in place for the small percentage of people struggling with problem gambling and we are working really hard to improve them. For example, this year we held the first ever Responsible Gambling Week.’
To the backdrop of non-regulation, online gambling is becoming a growing problem among middleclass teenagers who are already addicted to smartphones and are being bombarded by TV and online betting advertisements, with a plethora of high-profile names used in these ad campaigns in the hope of luring punters in.
Jockey Ruby Walsh appears in Paddy Power’s campaigns while Sky Sports’s Chris Kamara appears in adverts for Ladbrokes. And one of Sky Bet’s ads even featured Paul Merson, someone known to have had his own problems with gambling in the past. Then there’s the well-known actor Ray Winstone, who is the face of Bet365.
It’s also noteworthy, in relation to teenagers, that there is no watershed whatsoever for online betting ads, making them a target at any time.
ADDICTION counsellor and former Armagh GAA footballer Oisín McConville sees this on what he calls a massively increasing basis.
‘I go into schools to speak to students about problem gambling,’ he says. ‘Previously, we’d be asked to speak to final-year students – 16, 17 and 18-year-olds. Now we’re being asked to speak to 14-yearolds. I have met 18-year-old students who have already gone through full residential treatment for gambling addiction.
‘It’s getting younger and younger and it’s a real problem amongst teenagers from quite affluent areas who have easy access to money. I met one guy whose parents gave him a €1,000 betting voucher for his 18th birthday. That tipped him over the edge into problem gambling – he lost the money and began chasing the losses.
‘There’s an epidemic in this country and people have no idea it’s going on because there’s no industry regulation, no monitoring,’ adds Oisín. ‘The lack of legislation is laughable, embarrassing.
‘I’m dealing with families who are sitting at home with no idea that their home is about to be taken off them because of a husband’s compulsive gambling. This issue is killing people and destroying families around the country and it has to be dealt with.’
And there’s another big problem coming down the line for Ireland’s biggest cohort of problem online gamblers – 25- to 29-year-olds.
‘A conversation we’re increasingly having is about the impact of online gambling on people’s credit ratings,’ explains Oisín. ‘People are realising that if you gamble online and use your bank account to do so, when you go to look for a mortgage and the bank sees big spends with betting operators, you have zero chance of getting that mortgage.’
Oisín sought help for his own gambling problem 13 years ago, after admitting it had ‘beaten the crap’ out of him. After losing €20,000 on a cash bet in a bookies, he went out to his car and scraped together €7 to bet again, the lowest point of his gambling. He believes tactics used by online operators to target specific groups are fuelling the problem.
‘I haven’t gambled for 13 years,’ he says. ‘But last year a prominent betting operator sent me an email offering me free bets. Clearly they had gone through their dormant accounts to target people, to try and get them back.
‘Betting operators spend untold amounts of money making it as easy as possible to gamble online. It’s at the point where two taps on your phone allows you to place a bet. More sophisticated tactics come into play when rugby or football players have been signed to a club and are gifted free bets of between €1,000 and €10,000 to get them betting.’
Big spenders will be taken on trips to Las Vegas and, while betting operators will block players for winning too much, they will never block players who lose big, according to experts. Common tricks of the digital trade include free online bets or deposit matching, and while online gambling is driving growth in the industry, software development companies such as Optimove and Bet Buddy are behind the easy online betting systems now causing problems for vulnerable gamblers.
In-play betting – where spectators can alter bets as odds change during matches – has grown massively while low-stakes entertainment games such as RequestABet and WhatOddsPaddy are also growing. These are seen as lowwager, low-risk games but experts believe they are devised to target novice online gamblers.
Earlier this month, an undercover reporter from this newspaper exposed the dirty secrets and manipulative practices of the betting industry, showing how punters are secretly tracked to stadiums through their smartphones and exposing how the firms boast of harvesting online data in order to target novice gamblers, serial losers – and women.
Those women, regarded by many in the industry as ‘low-hanging fruit’, currently make up just 20% of gamblers in Ireland, but that figure will obviously change if the industry has its way. Online bingo, traditionally played by women, has seen a huge surge in popularity, with revenue doubling from €88million a year to more than €170million since 2011.
Online sites are set up in such a way that slot machine games are next to bingo. Straight after a game of bingo ends, female players go on to play the slots, which are far more lucrative for operators. Meanwhile, men who have suffered a big loss online go straight into online casinos, chasing their losses with roulette games in the hope of winning their money back.
‘Gamblers don’t see the next bet as their problem,’ says Oisín McConville. ‘They see it as their way out of their problem. The main change online gambling and smartphone apps have brought is easy access and speed. You can literally go to the toilet at home, bet €10,000, and then walk back into the living room to your family.’
And that’s how easy, corrosive and potentially life-destroying online gambling actually is. All Bets Are Off airs on Monday at 9.35pm on RTÉ One.