Mr. Barry Grant:

The target should be everybody. I appreciate the Deputy was saying there is a tiny minority of people who become severely addicted to gambling and, obviously, we have to make a lot of interventions towards those people. Nevertheless, as Desmond Tutu said, instead of pulling people out of the river, we need to go upstream and figure out why they are falling into the river in the first instance. According to the Health Research Board's recent data, 90,000 people are at low risk, 35,000 are at moderate risk and 12,000 are in the problem gambling or addiction category. Those at low risk have a one-in-three chance of ending up in the moderate-risk group, while those in that group have a one-in-three chance of ending up in the problem gambling group. The larger the funnel is at one end among all the people who gamble, the more people will filter into the low-risk, moderate-risk and problem gambling categories. We have to go all the way upstream and do prevention work, and we need to let people know gambling comes with harms. It is not a harmless activity and it can be addictive. We need to have interventions and safeguards all along the way.