Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We own the national lottery. It is important that we know how much in unclaimed prizes this company is using to deal with operational costs. We do not know that. We have no transparency about that. The argument from the regulator's office is that this is commercially sensitive information. I am baffled about how it can be commercially sensitive information given that this is a monopoly. The company has the contract for the next couple of decades. There is no competitor. Nobody is bidding and nobody can bid for the national lottery licence for the next couple of years. The reality is that during this tender process, the conditions were changed that allowed the company to use unclaimed prizes for its operational costs. I am not sure if the other bidders were aware of the significance of that change at the time. We have no transparency. The company is making a mint out of this contract from 2014. I think the hundreds of thousands of players - I am one of them - should know where their money is going. If it is going into advertising, that ties into the earlier point about aggressive promotion of the product for one purpose and one purpose only, which is to increase the profitability of this private company. Why can we not be given the information on the ratio of unclaimed prizes? How much of it is going into special games? How much is going into top-up prizes and how much is being used as the operational expenditure of this company, that is advertising and promotion?