Ms Carol Boate:

I agree it is unusual, but as I said earlier, it is unusual to regulate one company. In fact, I find that when speaking on my role as regulator, I have to explain my role as being slightly different from the norm. People may say that a regulator will do a consultation on some new standards that his or her office is thinking of bringing in, make a decision and apply them. That is perhaps what would be done with a code in the financial or any other sector. In this case, however, there is only one licensee and the State has signed a contract with the licensee to run the national lottery for us. It is our national lottery, but essentially they run it for us and they can take the profits. They paid €405 million for that licence and my job is to ensure that the contract is enforced. It is unusual, perhaps, because there is only one company involved. It is they who draft the codes and the licence does specify what those codes must cover. The sales code is not the easiest example to talk about. Perhaps the advertising code is easier to understand in the sense that one of the major exercises that was done in 2016 and 2017 was to put all of the rules about advertising gambling that are in the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland's code into the advertising and promotion code applying to the national lottery. It definitely should not be any weaker, and if anything it should be stricter, because the conditions were lifted, lock, stock and barrel into the advertising code. We keep abreast of what the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland is doing, what else is happening in the general space of the online world, and what the Oireachtas is saying about social media and online selling.