Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I do not want to repeat myself, but this is the nub of the matter. Why do I feel that in holding this competition the Government is giving away our rights as Irish people to make profits and extract them in the next 20 years? Perhaps somebody is lurking in the background, but we cannot get involved in the competition. The competition for the up-front payment, namely, the selling of the lottery licence, is skewing the issue. It is the reason we are all here, why we will probably not have a regulator and why we will have to extract funds and pay back profits to gaming consortiums which will come in with the highest bid. I asked the Minister about bids for the licence. In one sense, the Minister's office is trying to constrain online gambling. If that is done, it will bring down the bid, but if not, it will bring up it.

The holding of a competition for the upfront payment for the leasing, sale or loaning of the licence for 20 years is the nub of the whole thing. I am deeply opposed to this for 1,000 different reasons, one being that we will not get the right price because of the constraint and we will have an explosion if we do not have it.

I am not against change and reform, as I was accused of. I am not a purist, a fantasist or a lunatic, but I feel we could be opening up online gambling, and restricting it or semi-restricting it for ourselves. It is the upfront payment that skews us to have to repeal an Act, change things, extract a profit, because no matter who they are, whether they are Irish, English or Italian, they are not altruistic and they are not Santa. So over 20 years a profit is going to be extracted back, and rightly so. Give somebody €500 million and you are going to get €1 billion back over the years. Section 26 is the nub of the Bill, and I am absolutely and entirely opposed to it for those reasons. We are no longer in control. When you are in control you can tighten things. When you are not in control, and the people who are operating the lotto do not get their money back, it can end up getting loosened, prices can go up and profits must be made. I wonder about that Hobson's choice, because that is the nub of the whole thing.