DECLAN LYNCH

GAA and the morals of gambling

THE motion which the GAA passed at Congress, calling for “sponsorship by a betting company of any competition, team, playing gear, or facility” to be prohibited, was passed with a 93pc majority. It is fair to say that, in doing this, the GAA is leading the world.

Whether the world wants to be led, whether its sporting organisations in particular are taking inspiration from this, is another matter.

Indeed all the signs are saying that that world is quite happy the way things are, and can see no other way of organising itself, except to take the money from the bookies, and to be grateful for it.

But in our little world at least, we should be celebrating this decision by the GAA, and the progressive attitude it has adopted for some time, to these issues of gambling. You might even have formed the impression that the only people in Ireland who are addressing their addictions in this area, are well-known inter-county footballers and hurlers such as Niall McNamee, Oisin McConville, Davy Glennon, and Cathal McCarron.

There have also been court cases involving Galway footballer Mark Hehir, and Tipperary hurling goalkeeper Darren Gleeson, in which gambling was a major issue.

There has always been something of a subterranean betting culture in the GAA, but it has been sent into another dimension by the arrival of online gambling. Because it has so many members who are young, male, sports-loving and competitive, the GAA would be target-rich for the online bookies. But there are other organisations and companies and corporations in Ireland of which the same could broadly be said, and they have not addressed this problem with any of the urgency the GAA has shown.

Star players such as McNamee and McConville have given leadership in relation to their own problems. There is a culture whereby the GAA now has a Community and Health Manager, Colin Regan, who understands the nature and the scale of the gambling phenomenon.

And yet there is an almost comical failure in the broader culture to extrapolate from these GAA stories, to draw the blindingly obvious conclusion that if such a high proportion of Gaelic footballers and hurlers are being swept away by this addiction, maybe… just maybe… it is quietly affecting people in other walks of life to the same extent?

I mean, would that be entirely out of the question? Or are we to assume that when a young man enters a GAA dressing room for the first time, he imbibes some strange elixir which immediately releases all these uncontrollable gambling energies that were dormant within him, and that remain dormant in other parts of the community? I don’t think so.

The GAA is, therefore, leading the rest of Ireland as well as the rest of the world on this matter, and in banning sponsorship by bookies, Congress will indeed accomplish something of great value in this country.

Unfortunately, we may be on our own out there. It is no exaggeration to say that many professional sports in the world are now effectively owned by the gambling corporations. Even the wealthiest of them have somehow arranged it so that a GAA-type ban on betting sponsorship would virtually put them out of business overnight.

Half of the Premier League teams have a bookie’s logo on their shirts; there is incessant advertising at the grounds and during television coverage — and this in a game which, in theory, should not be that desperate for money from such sources.

Leaving aside for a moment the problem of punters being drawn into a life-destroying addiction, the proliferation of gambling is raising issues of a fundamental nature in relation to the basic integrity of sports, without which, as they say, the game is gone.

Yes, in theory, Premier League players should be rich enough not to need to be indulging in a spot of match-fixing to pay the rent. Yet they are even more target-rich for the bookies than their GAA counterparts, with many of them now as addicted to gambling as the poor unfortunates who support their clubs.

In theory, there should be no betting scandals in these higher echelons. But, in reality, we will be seeing a lot more action in this domain, the kind of thing we have already seen in this country in relation to that fabled Midlands Classico between Athlone Town and Longford Town.

And once you get down into areas such as snooker and darts and tennis, you are in that dark zone in which nobody can tell if the match is happening and people are betting on it, or the match is happening solely because people are betting on it.

In fact it’s not really a dark zone, in a sport such as tennis for the most part it is the only zone, with matches being played in front of about five people in some lonesome clay-court arena in Eastern Europe, while millions are being gambled online on every game, perhaps on every point.

This has not happened by accident, it has clearly been the intention of the gambling corporations to buy up any sport on which it is humanly possible to place a bet, in these years in which the gambling industry in general has been fantastically unregulated.

They may not have all the money in the world of sport, but they seem to have most of it. And they are using it with a frenzied enthusiasm, so that by the time a bit of the old “light-touch” regulation eventually comes in, there will virtually be no sport that is not inextricably tangled up with gambling.

Indeed it has happened so fast, and so comprehensively, that the GAA is probably one of the few serious sporting organisations left in the world which is in any position to reject betting sponsorship, which has not already sold itself to the bookies. Which is another reason why the ban has impressed internationally recognised specialists such as Professor Samantha Thomas, based in Melbourne, who works in gambling harm prevention. She described it simply as “outstanding”.

And it is all the more so, when you consider that in Ireland historically we have tended not to view the GAA as being in the vanguard of progressive thinking.

Indeed, we are still haunted by scenes in days of yore from the All-Ireland Finals featuring the Artane Boys Band, which we now fully realise was an endorsement by the GAA of the Irish gulag, its explicit approval of a culture of institutionalised abuse.

Councillor Mannix Flynn is right when he says, “there’s no reason under the sun why the Artane Band can’t lose its name, lose its uniform and re-constitute itself ”. Perhaps Congress can deal with this one next year?

And we can’t help noticing, that the GAA may be spurning the bookies, but they are still talking large amounts of sponsorship from what can only be described as AIB.

Frankly, you would need to be Thomas Aquinas to draw a precise moral distinction between the activities of the betting corporations and those of the banks, and Thomas Aquinas is not available right now.

We’ll just have to work that one out for ourselves.

Tony 10 — The Astonishing Story of the Postman Who Gambled €10m... and lost it all, by Declan Lynch and Tony O’Reilly, published by Gill Books