Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy for raising this serious issue. Deputy Doherty is not the only Member to raise it. Deputy Michael McGrath has also raised the matter.

For the record I will outline how this works. The operator of the national lottery, Premier Lotteries Ireland, PLI, has found that four top prizes were not included for players to win in three of the 178 scratch card games it has offered since taking over the licence in 2014. The four prizes together are worth €180,000 and represent some 1.36% of total prize funds of those three scratch card games. These omissions were discovered through an internal review of all national lottery products over the last six weeks, and we are told they were cause by human error. Lotto, Euro Millions, Daily Millions, digital games and all other national lottery products were unaffected by these errors. The Regulator of the National Lottery was promptly notified of the review and has been updated regularly since.

There are real questions to answer here and the Deputy has pointed to some of them. At a minimum, the regulator and the operator should come before an Oireachtas committee to explain what has happened. I am certainly not against the idea of an independent investigation with regard to how this could have happened. The integrity of the lottery system is hugely important given how valuable it is to the many good causes it funds.

The Government has an open mind around getting to the bottom of what actually happened in this case. I do not believe it is acceptable to simply dismiss this as human error at some point in the management chain. We are certainly open to what the Deputy has called for. The Government, however, needs to have a fuller understanding of the appropriate course of action to get to the detail of what went wrong to ensure the public can have full confidence in the lottery system that so many people play on a daily and weekly basis.

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