Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The fact the Minister is setting up an office of regulator really is the giveaway that the Government is going for privatisation of the lottery. His line on this legislation and on this new development in terms of the lottery is that not a great deal is changing except that the State will get money up-front for the children's hospital but the setting up of the office of the regulator belies that fact. The Minister needs a regulator because he is letting off the leash the lottery, and potentially gambling, previously controlled by the Minister and operated by a semi-State company controlled by the State, and putting it very likely into the hands of private for-profit companies. If not much was changing, the Minister simply would not need a regulator. I support the amendment in the same context as I oppose the entire move and the Bill itself.

The history of regulators is not a good one. That is linked to the fact that regulators seem to be set up precisely when we are letting important sectors of the economy off the leash and they have failed, time and again, to control the sectors that they are supposed to control. The most obvious example is the Financial Regulator's abysmal failure to control the banking and financial sector with devastating consequences for the economy but another example I cite is the Taxi Regulator.

Few taxi drivers have a good word to say about the Taxi Regulator given the utter failure of that regulator to control the taxi industry with pretty devastating consequences for that industry, which was deregulated from its previous position. That is another strong case for the establishment of a regulator and the Minister has not really done that because he does not want to acknowledge that something is happening in terms of the privatisation of something that has rightly been controlled up to now by the Government.

It goes against the grain of the Government's commitment to reduce the number of quangos when here we are setting up another one. Why can this not be policed as has been done in the past? With people being hit left, right and centre with austerity measures and cuts, it will grate with people to establish yet another quango.

See this speech in context