Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)
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The unprecedented challenge for this Government is to find resources to invest in job creation and in providing an infrastructure which is urgently needed. Nobody is against the notion of building a national children's hospital, so we need to find the wherewithal to do so. In my judgment, this is a very good way to do so. I do not believe it does any damage to the integrity of the lottery. In fact, we have taken great pains to lay out a structure which preserves the integrity and ethos of the lottery because, ultimately, a lottery is based on trust, and if people lose trust in it there will be no future for the lottery.

I know Deputy Boyd Barrett is allergic to the idea of profit as a motive to do anything, but we sell licences. We sold the broadband spectrum licence last year for many hundreds of millions of euro and I do not remember him attacking that. The last time the licence was issued, it could have gone to Camelot or to anybody else. As I indicated to the committee previously, a number of parties were interested in it, so we will see who will be successful in bidding for this.

As I said, it is our intention to safeguard the income stream for good causes. It is in our interest to preserve a robust prize fund, and we will deal with this in some detail later on. Deputy McDonald tabled an amendment on that issue. All of these things, including the issue of holding on to a decent income stream for the retailers, are the balances and checks we have put into this.

The objective to defend the income stream for good causes is a good one. The Deputies opposite are absolutely right in saying it is important that communities which depend on funding should have access to sports grants and all the things which have been funded from this income into the future. This is a good idea. People will be opposed to it in principle, as they were to the initial lottery, but all the checks and balances we have built into this in more than a year of thinking about it, refining it, getting expert advice on it and looking at best practices internationally will strengthen the lottery into the future.

The nature of people's access to gambling is changing as more people use online facilities and so on. We need to make provision for that or, as I have indicated, the old model will simply run out of steam.