Deputy Eamon Ó Cuív:

I thank the Irish Bookmakers Association for its presentation. The headline figure for turnover was €2.6 billion. The first thing that strikes me is that for every adult in the State that represents €800 in betting. There are many people like me who do not bet. For a country that people are always saying is bust, some people are betting quite an amount of money. Some of these statistics are always interesting.

Have the witnesses any figures on how much betting now takes place online as compared to through bookmakers? It is a crucial figure because there is currently a natural move to all sorts of things being done online. Nothing can be had from the Department of Agriculture these days without filling in a form online.

The witnesses talk about a decline. There was always going to be a decline from the peak, because the economy declined. It is discretionary spending and the first thing to be taken off the agenda is betting. Let us be honest. On average, the bookmaker has to win, otherwise there would be no bookmakers. That includes all the online betting operations. A friend of mine says the house always wins in the end. That is the nature of the business. Only a real expert could make a living out of betting against the shop.

I would be interested in the witnesses' views on how much of the decline, and the rise to the €3.2 billion, is due to the economy - a fair bit of it must be - and to what extent it is just a natural change. Whether people are banking, filling in forms, taxing their car or doing a million other things, there has been a move away from physically having to go somewhere to do a thing, towards to being able to do it anywhere, particularly because of these gadgets that allow people do all sorts of things where they are sitting. No matter what financial regime we had in place, some of this change was going to happen anyway.

Although bookmakers cannot claim back VAT, they are also not paying VAT. Most people who can claim back VAT wind up paying more on the sales than they do getting VAT deductions on the purchases. That is the way VAT works. If the Government brought in a 5%, 10% or 15% VAT rate, the bookmakers would wind up paying more than they would save in all the reclaims. I am not sure that argument stands up but I would be interested in the witnesses' take on it.

When we consider the history of betting duty, it was at 10% and went down to 5% in 1999. In 2002, it went down to 2% and was cut to 1% in 2006. I was there for the last two reductions although I was not in Cabinet for the first one. We brought the rate down because the market was totally distorted between online betting and the bookmakers' betting. The fear was that we were accelerating the migration to online betting and I think we had a fair point, as there was a fair amount of employment in the bookmakers' shops. Can we turn it around in the other direction? If online betting is now the favourite, would it be a good idea to have a higher online betting duty than bookmakers' duty, say, if we had 3% online and 1% in the shops? What is to say we could not reverse it in this way? What would the witnesses think of that?