Mr. Martin Le Jeune:

I am here with my colleague, Jackie Murphy, who is the head of Ladbrokes in Ireland. We are grateful for the invitation and we welcome the inquiry. We welcome what the committee is doing and we are on the same page with it as far as safer gambling is concerned.

Members may not have heard of Entain, but we are one of the world’s largest sports-betting and gaming groups. In Ireland, people probably know us as Ladbrokes. We employ 700 people and have 133 betting shops in the State. We are very proud to operate in Ireland and we would like to continue doing so. We make a very significant contribution to Ireland's economy beyond employment. In 2019, the last representative year given the lockdown, we paid well over €14 million to the State via various channels.

We believe gambling is a legitimate activity that thousands of Irish people participate in safely and responsibly and we think the work of the committee in establishing a new regulator is going to be an extremely positive development. In fact, it gives Ireland the opportunity to be an example of regulatory excellence and we welcome that. We need to ensure safer gambling. On the comparative evidence from the UK, I hold my hand up immediately because I know we cannot just transfer UK experience to Ireland. The evidence suggests, however, that problem gambling in the UK is stable or falling. We would like the regulator to carry out the same kind of research and find the same kind of evidence that exists in the UK for the Irish market. Our view is that online gambling is inherently no more dangerous than retail gambling, and I am sure this will come up in questions.

We would like to state to the committee that we have a complete commitment to reducing levels of problem gambling wherever we can because we want to be a sustainable business, with loyal and contented customers. As a result, we have invested very heavily in technological solutions to treating problem gambling online and we can deal with these in more detail during questions. We have a system called advanced responsibility and care, ARC, which is increasingly seeking not only to identify people who have problem gambling behaviour but to anticipate that and to intervene before it develops into problem gambling.

As the committee has seen from our submission, we welcome the general scheme and we welcome its main themes. There are a few reservations that we have in regard to betting shop displays, advertising, marketing and sponsorship, and those are based on the fact that we want our customers to enjoy betting as freely as possible. Second, as Ms Murphy will discuss, our shops are an integral part of communities. Finally, sponsorship and advertising support Irish sport, particularly Irish horse racing, which is one of this country's greatest assets.