Don’t miss Declan Lynch — Orwell saw it all,

IWOULDN’T normally be thinking about George Orwell first thing in the morning, but these days it seems that it’s all Orwell, all the time.

Last Tuesday morning it started for me with Bryan Dobson on Morning Ireland, doing an item about the Euromillions winner.

It was a big item too, reflecting the fact that €175m is a big amount of money. But there would have been other items too, such as the possible destruction of our civilisation by the forces of the No-Deal far right, which have a certain bigness about them. There are Euromillions of another kind in that one.

Yet there was Dobbo doing the lottery story in the prime location on the show, the first item after the eight o’clock news. Which made me think of this line in Orwell’s 1984: “The Lottery, with its weekly payout of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention… Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary…”

Now the €175m won by the folks from The Naul and thereabouts is not imaginary, in a technical sense, in the sense that these actual people will receive that actual money. But for anyone who “plays” the lottery, it is all imaginary.

For a few moments, you imagine yourself winning, but you also know that you have less chance of getting there than you have of being struck by a bolt of lightning, or of walking away from a plane crash. Or maybe being struck by a bolt of lightning while you are walking away from that plane crash.

So one of the least true things that has ever been said, in the world of advertising, is the lottery slogan: It Could Be You. Indeed, it is so much more true to say that: It Couldn’t Be You.

The lotto-line is one of the least true things that has ever been said not just in the world of advertising, but in the world. Indeed, it might have occurred to Dobbo to put this to the man from the National Lottery while he had him there. But instead they spoke of the ways in which the winners of €175m might react to this new situation, the difference that €175m might make to you, things that affect us all at some stage of our lives — or not, as the case may be.

They didn’t talk about the advertising, as such, because effectively what was happening in this lead item on Morning Ireland, was itself advertising — which reminded me again, oddly enough, of Orwell, who explained that “news is something that someone, somewhere wants to suppress, the rest is advertising”.

Indeed, this advertising for the lottery was the lead item on Sean O’Rourke too, and on the RTE TV news. All of it was advertising — though the people who were putting it out didn’t seem to know that. Maybe they thought we needed a bit of “good news” to take our minds off the many public events tormenting us — though there’s a limited number of people for whom winning €175m really is good news, and soon we knew that it was limited to one family, in The Naul.

It was good for them, but it may indeed have been bad for others, who were only being reminded of how broke they are. And you wouldn’t need to be George Orwell either to steer the conversation briefly away from the lines approved by the proverbial Ministry of Plenty — there was a report in January about the Lottery Regulator sending underage kids to 510 shops around the country, and finding that 37pc of them were able to buy scratchcards.

It might also have been a good time to ask one of these spokespeople to remind us why exactly the Government sold off the lottery when it is still apparently such a success under the excellent terms offered to its new proprietors.

And the ease with which gambling corporations can advertise themselves for free, could also be heard on a recent Morning Ireland when ‘It Says In The Papers’ read out a piece about a chap who won €4.8m for €10 in an online betting game. What a result for the bookies, to supply the copy for that to the newspaper, which runs it like it’s not an ad, and it is then broadcast to the multitudes.

Really, you’d expect them to know how this works, on ‘It Says In The Papers’ — I mean, do they not read the papers?

Yet it never seems quite right to me, to describe any lottery as gambling. A lot of the pleasure of gambling comes from the idea of having your judgment vindicated. And since there is usually very little judgment involved in picking a few numbers and hoping for the best, it is like gambling with all the good things about gambling taken out.

Like Winston Smith, I would have nothing to do with it. So it Could Be You, but it Couldn’t Be Me.

Though I think it is fair to say, it Won’t Be You either.

‘Really, you’d expect them to know how this works on ‘It Says In The Papers’ — I mean, do they not read the papers?’