House wins in cultural triumph of Bookies Inc
Declan Lynch’s Diary
IKNEW there must be something strange going on, when the man from the Department of Justice called me to ask if I could take part in one of the panel discussions at the Gambling Seminar held by Minister of State David Stanton at Farmleigh House last Wednesday.
“That’s strange,” I mused, a speech bubble forming over my head. I have been writing on this subject for about 15 years in these pages, and I have also written three books related to this theme, so naturally in all that time, I have never received a single request from any official body for a contribution on the issues of gambling harm, and where it’s coming from, and what might be done about it.
No academic researcher, no “industry representative”, and no one from any department has troubled me in all that time, seeking my views on the basis of the 98m words or so that I have written on the matter — though of course they might have been reading the articles or listening to Off The Ball or the Matt Cooper
show, and taking copious notes. Or not, as the case may be.
That is how the world works, I have found, and I accept it. I would merely question how well that world works, when you consider than in 2013, a Gambling Control Bill was published and it is now 2019 and there is still no Gambling Control Bill, as such.
But there is a Gambling Regulator, or at least there will be, in 18 months’ time. This was one of the main announcements by Minister of State David Stanton at Farmleigh, this appointment of an actual Regulator with an actual staff of about 100, operating in the actual world at an actual time before the end of 2020.
“That is strange,” I mused again.
As I took my place on the afternoon panel with Willie Collins of the Gambling Awareness Trust, and Pauline Campbell of Dunlewey Addiction Services, and Jim Walsh of the Department of Health, I made the perhaps naive suggestion that there is an urgency to the situation, a global epidemic of online gambling indeed, which might require a swifter response than this 18-month time frame.
And ideally it wouldn’t be starting from here. It would be starting from, say, 15 years ago. Yet as I looked around that elegant ballroom at Farmleigh, at the various parties with an interest in the proceedings, I realised that Mr Stanton was doing something quite serious here — or to put it more simply, he was doing something.
He was doing something, in such a way that it may not be undone by his successors, taking further soundings from the myriad “stakeholders”. And what “stakeholders” they were — you had gambling regulators from many lands, murmuring arcane wisdom; you had men exuding an enormous sense of wellbeing so I assumed them to be executives from the betting corporations; you had the operators of card clubs or casinos; you had a few people of indeterminate origin taking copious notes; you had members of the caring professions and of the uncaring professions. Big players, baby! And in fact one of the problems for legislators or for anyone who is vaguely well intentioned, is that it is too big. Say I am the Minister, and I want to take a hammer to advertising and sponsorship of sporting events by betting corporations. Given the humongous level of their profits and their acquisitive zeal during these years of unregulated frenzy, the bookies now effectively “own” so many sports that if you took away their sponsorship, you’d be taking a hammer to most of the sports too. You would also be taking a hammer to parts of the TV business and, of course, to the advertising game itself.
Say I am the Minister, would I be the Minister for Justice, the Minister for Health, or the Minister for Sport? Maybe the Minister for Finance?
It has become a hydraheaded thing, and as the Minister, not only would I be wrestling with a monstrosity, I would be acutely aware that it is controlled by some of the cleverest people on the planet — you need to be smart to transform a business that was once noted for its seediness and even its sordidness, into a kind of lethal form of family entertainment.
So I’d be quite happy to leave the legislation and so forth to the present Minister, because oddly enough, I am not as fixated on the regulations that the bookies have somehow escaped, as on their cultural triumph.
Because it is that which has informed all the rest of it. Our culture has largely accepted their line, that it’s all a bit of fun, that a tiny minority might have a problem (the margin of error, really) and that most people can have an oul’ bet and no harm done.
Which is a tad simplistic, when only last week the UK Gambling Commission, which was represented at Farmleigh by the excellent Tim Miller, fined four of its online casino licensees £4.5m for slack attention to anti-money laundering, customer due diligence, and social responsibility obligations. Oh yes, that hydra-headed beast has a money-laundering aspect too.
Hard to imagine that such a thing could conceivably happen in old Ireland by the end of 2020.
Strange but true?
‘Given their acquisitive zeal, the bookies now effectively “own” many sports...’