Teens being groomed to gamble says ex-addict who stole €1.75m
THE lack of betting regulation in Ireland has allowed the industry to ‘groom the next generation’ of gamblers, according to a prominent addiction counsellor and former problem gambler who stole €1.75m to fuel his addiction. Teenagers well below the legal age of 18 are now spending hundreds on bets and getting sucked into addiction earlier thanks to ease of access, according to Tony O’Reilly, who gives talks in schools around the country on the dangers of gambling.
Mr O’Reilly made headlines in 2012 when he was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing €1.75m from the post office he managed. He estimates his addiction cost him €10m over 10 years.
Now dedicated to counselling, spreading awareness and pushing reform in the industry, Mr O’Reilly said the prominence of gambling is ‘having a huge impact on our young people’.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘I see it in schools day in day out where there’s people putting their hands up to say they bet regularly, and they’re 15 and 16-yearolds. That can’t continue.
‘I was in a school recently where the teacher was saying that the 16-year-olds are gambling hundreds of euros, not just fivers and tenners.’
Mr O’Reilly said minors can create accounts online due to a lack of robust regulation in Ireland.
Others will walk into a bookmakers and place bets the old-fashioned way.
And an increasingly common method is
One 15-year-old told me he had an online account with a bookie
for someone who can legitimately create an account to act as a middleman between underage punters and betting companies.
‘They can send the money by Revolut. They’ll put a bet on and send back any winnings [after taking a cut]. The movement of cash is instantaneous nowadays.’
Mr O’Reilly said young people are ‘very resourceful’ when it comes to getting around technology.
‘They’ll find ways around everything and anything. I remember one particular fellow told me he had an online account with a particular bookie. I said: “How can you gamble at 15?”
‘“Ah sure this bookie doesn’t know I’m 15, they think I’m 28. I can manipulate the data on my phone.”’
Mr O’Reilly, who is from Co. Carlow, said video games in which players can bet ingame items (often referred to as skin gambling), ‘normalises gambling and teaches people how to gamble’.
‘Then you’ve social media influencers posting videos on how to win bigger amounts of money in these online casinos. Even though they’re only virtual, it does normalise gambling behaviour. So people are gambling a lot younger and we need this regulation in place for that as much as anything else.’
The long-awaited regulation around gambling, in train for 10 years with a regulator body finally instated last year, will introduce strong penalties for providing services to under 18s and will require a stricter ID process.
It will prohibit gambling companies from sponsoring certain events and introduce a watershed for gambling ads on TV around what time they can be shown and how many within an ad break.
The new legislation will include a ban on inducements to gamble, such as offers for free bets – at present it is not uncommon for people who haven’t used their accounts in a while to be enticed back with free bets of up to hundreds of euro.
And it will include a national gambling exclusion scheme, through which problem gamblers can sign up to a register of people who are barred from being given an account. (Currently, a problem gambler who wants to self-exclude must go into a shop and have their photo taken. Paddy Power allows gamblers to exclude themselves from shops of their choice after doing this once but for other companies, gamblers must visit each shop individually.)
Critics of the new legislation, mainly from within the betting industry, claim it will lead to a rise in black market gambling.
But Mr O’Reilly said the arguments of a black market and job losses are always peddled by the gambling industry and are overstated, and that it is the very actions of gambling companies that drive people to black markets.
‘There are all kinds of stories – and we hear them every single day – about people who win too much from bookies and their accounts are restricted or closed. That can drive them to the black markets.
‘There is a legitimate concern [around the black market] but I don’t think it’s as big as is always being made out. I never went near a black market [when he was gambling] and I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and very few of them talk about black market gambling.
‘It’s usually the big operators that are in England and Ireland, the online operators that we’ve all heard of.’
Mr O’Reilly said he visited Norway recently with his Problem Gambling Podcast co-host Barry Grant and learned the black market operators there are wellknown betting companies that are legal elsewhere, such as in the UK.
‘They wouldn’t have a licence to operate in those countries because it’s a monopoly. But they will open up accounts for people with addresses in Norway and Finland, even though they would probably know that they’re not allowed to operate in those countries.’
Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland CEO Anne Marie Caulfield – Ireland’s first gambling regulator – told the MoS the new legislation will be ‘really strong in terms of the protection of children’.
The former Residential Tenancies Board director highlighted the ‘teeth’ the regulator will have and stressed they would be used where rules are broken, ‘because the consequences [of problem gambling] can be very serious for individuals and for the families’.
Fines can be up to €20m or 10% of turnover, a business’s operating licence can be suspended or withdrawn, or – ‘in particular’ in relation to children – a prison sentence of up to eight years can be handed down.
Critics of the new legislation claim it will lead to a rise in black market gambling