Mr. Barry Grant:

Regarding what practices we want to see banned, certainly we mentioned the FOBTs to the committee earlier. Gambling advertising is at absolutely saturation point. Anybody who turns on the radio, looks at social media, opens a newspaper or watches television, especially if one has a passing interest in sport or even daytime soap operas will be inundated with relentless gambling advertising.

Gambling is an over-18s product for very obvious and proper reasons. It is also a product that will become addictive to a certain percentage of the people who use it. We do not allow the advertising of cigarettes any more, which is an over-18s addictive product, and we have greatly curtailed the advertising of alcohol, which is an over-18s addictive product. If I were to ban one thing it would be to put a pre-watershed ban on all forms of gambling advertising. I say that because we also know, and the Deputy mentioned research into young people, through the European School Survey Project for 2019, that Irish males aged 15 to 16 had a problem gambling prevalence rate of 1.7%, which is over five times the current or the believed problem gambling prevalence rate in the adult population. We cannot keep normalising gambling as a healthy, happy and grown-up product that has no harms and expect young people not to be become addicted to it or develop unhealthy relationships with it. I apologise if I have taken too much time but it is so important that we pull back and put gambling on a par with alcohol, tobacco and other addictive products in terms of advertising.