Mr. Barry Grant:

I thank the Chair and committee members. Gambling addiction and gambling-related harm are the forgotten issues of Irish society. While they receive a substantial amount of media attention, they have in essence been ignored by the State. There have been no meaningful statutory interventions to prevent and reduce gambling harm or to provide treatment for people with addictions or supports for affected others. There has been no statutory public health campaign to warn people of the potential harms associated with gambling. Addiction task forces are limited to dealing with drugs and alcohol. While Ireland is one of the world’s leaders in gambling industry innovation, we are laggards in providing safeguards to vulnerable adults and children. As such, it is imperative that the gambling regulation Bill be enacted as soon as is humanly possible.

As members will know, the 2013 gambling control Bill was never enacted. We will never know how many people have unnecessarily suffered from gambling-related harm in the intervening nine-year period. The recently published Health Research Board survey, Gambling in the Republic of Ireland, found that there are 137,000 people experiencing low-risk, moderate-risk or problem gambling in Ireland. International research has found that for every person with a gambling problem, an additional eight to ten people are negatively impacted. These include children, partners, parents, siblings, friends, co-workers and employers. Even at the lower end of that scale, this would mean that roughly one in four people in Ireland will be impacted by some degree of gambling harm in his or her lifetime.

The consumption of gambling is increasingly moving online. As such, it should become easier to identify problematic, harmful gambling behaviours and intervene. Most of the large online gambling operators that are licensed in Ireland are already tracking markers of harm, as required by the UK's Gambling Commission. Many of these operators have artificial intelligence systems which can flag harmful gambling behaviours and automate interventions. It is imperative that Ireland’s future gambling regulatory authority have access to anonymised, randomised data sets in order to have a real-time overview of the level of problem gambling within operators’ customer bases.

In the recent past, many household name online gambling companies have received substantial fines from the UK's Gambling Commission for using this type of data to incentivise people with gambling problems to gamble more, rather than intervening to encourage the person to stop and seek help. In the ongoing absence of gambling regulation in Ireland, how many people have been on the receiving end of these tactics here with no oversight? How many vulnerable people with gambling problems and their loved ones have suffered as a result? On behalf of the people who use our service, we urge the committee to ensure this Bill does not receive the same fate as the 2013 gambling control Bill. I thank the Chair and members. I will be happy to answer their questions.