Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank and congratulate the Minister of State on this far-reaching Bill. Significant work has gone into it. He has managed to go much further in the Bill than we on the justice committee expected when we did our work in this area. I congratulate him on the Bill, which I know has the opportunity to develop further through the various legislative Stages. In particular, I congratulate him on the provisions in Chapter 3 in respect of notifications, the obligation not to offer inducements, the obligation not to permit children to participate and the sponsorship provisions. Similarly, I congratulate him on Chapters 4 and 5. It goes very far.

I agree with Deputy Gannon regarding how the Bill could go further in respect of sponsorship and advertising. The Bill contains provisions relating to children up to the age of 18 but the Minister of State and I discussed recently at the justice committee in the context of young people generally how the brain develops up to the age of 25. I know he is considering measures in the context of young people up to the age of 25 in the area of youth justice, for example. Persons up to that age may still be considerably under the influence of suggestive material. Of course, this is difficult because the line between being a child and being an adult has to be drawn somewhere, but research shows that many people, particularly young men, can remain vulnerable up to that age. That point has been highlighted by those working in gambling addiction; I have not based my observations solely on my knowledge of the situation.

I wish to highlight a couple of points from the committee recommendations. As the Minister of State will be aware, we on the committee had an extensive engagement with representatives of the gambling industry. In many ways, it was a disappointing engagement. We proactively asked questions in respect of self-exclusion and the management of companies in tracking people they believed may have difficulties, or who had identified as having difficulties. Many of the responses we got focused on the UK operation rather than the Irish one. That was insufficient for our purposes. Some of the companies came back and provided better information but, as Vice Chair of the justice committee, I was struck by how ill-prepared the companies were for that line of questioning, given it is the point of the Bill, and how defensive they were in respect of it. One certainly did not get the sense that it was an issue they were proactively managing or that they were eager to explain to us all the safety measures they had taken.

The Regulator of the National Lottery recently came before the Committee of Public Accounts. The matter came up in that context at the committee two weeks ago. We were told the national lottery had erred in a related way. Some 48 people who had self-excluded from using national lottery products, which are just gambling products, of course, were subsequently contacted by the national lottery. The regulator imposed no sanction on the national lottery other than noting the matter in its annual report. It considers that to be a sanction but I do not. We on the committee followed up with questions relating to the number of people who had self-excluded from the national lottery. It appears there were 1,500 exclusions relating solely to national lottery products in 2020 and 1,300 in 2021. I raise that, first, to highlight the Irish context and, second, to show that the national lottery is very much a gambling product as well. Having had that engagement with the national lottery regulator, I was struck by the scale of advertising in which the national lottery and other companies engage, particular during "The Late Late Toy Show". Deputy Gannon also made reference to advertising. I suspect the Minister of State was busy with this or other Bills while "The Late Late Toy Show" was on, but I watched it and I was struck by how it seemed that during every ad break, there was an ad depicting two people passing over a national lottery ticket as a Christmas present. That was one of the first times that the scale of advertising became clear to me having had that recent engagement. The advertising was just related to the national lottery itself.

The Minister of State will forgive me for not knowing the technical phrase but there is a betting product whereby one can bet on the outcome of the national lottery. Irrespective of my criticism of the national lottery, no good can come from such a product. At least the national lottery has the good causes provision and transfers funds in that regard. I highlight that to the Minister of State. There is some value in the national lottery version but it is being utterly undermined by that betting product.

Another relevant piece relating to the advertising spend is that there is a provision for unspent or unawarded prizes in the context of the national lottery. The licence provides that such prizes should be redistributed to other prize funds, and may also be used for advertising. We on the Committee of Public Accounts, however, found that the inverse was true, in that 98% of that funding, totalling approximately €122 million, had been used for additional advertising, while a small amount was used for additional prizes. It occurred to me that we do not have visibility of the advertising spend in various forms of media. What is the actual advertising spend on a lottery product, by the national lottery or otherwise, with RTÉ, for example? What is the advertising spend with a particular group of newspapers or on local radio or wherever else? What capacity is there for mischief in that regard in the reporting of anything to do with those products or companies? Those data may be available to the Minister of State but, if not, that would be interesting research to conduct.

On the issue of whether advertising can be banned more broadly, the committee was told that if gambling advertisements were banned, that would result in the closure of more retail betting shops. We were told that almost 50% of the network of betting shops had closed in recent times and that the banning of gambling advertisements would push customers towards other avenues of gambling, such as unlicensed operators. I have no sympathy whatsoever for that argument. It is important to put that on record. We heard similar arguments in respect of smoking bans and other things - how the sky would fall down if these various things were done by the State. Of course, the State can do these things, and go further. Indeed, the Minister of State has gone further in the Bill. I wish to highlight, however, that he should have no fear in continuing to press ahead with the prohibition or regulation of advertising in every context. He should have no fear that the shops will have to close.

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