Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

These amendments are designed to preserve the existing law in Ireland. It is a law that is being deliberately breached day in, day out by powerful casino operators in this city. Under the Gaming and Lotteries Act 1956, one cannot run an amusement hall unless a local authority has decided that either in the whole of or in part of its area there should be a regime in place that permits the operation of amusement halls. That means that in places such as Bundoran in County Donegal, Balbriggan in County Dublin and Bray in County Wicklow there were amusement halls where slot machines and the like were permitted - one-armed bandits, as they were. It allowed Wicklow County Council or Bray Urban District Council, or wherever it may be, to say that amusement halls would be permitted in part of its area but in other parts of its area they would not. That is the law of the land right now and it is provided for under the Gaming and Lotteries Act 1956. Part III of that Act provides that local authorities have to adopt a resolution to make lawful the operation of what are termed under that Act "amusement halls". If local authorities do not operate amusement halls, it is completely illegal for anybody else to operate them.

To put this in context, what happened was that the Revenue Commissioners persuaded the Department of Finance to run a Finance Bill requiring finance permits to be applied to every slot machine or betting machine. No attempt was made to change the law as to where these machines could be operated. Nobody ever looked at Part III of the Gaming and Lotteries Act 1956 to determine whether or not that law was or was not in operation.

I do not know if the Minister of State is aware of this but members of An Garda Síochána in Dublin seized machines in places such as O'Connell Street and removed them from premises. I do not know what happened thereafter and no efforts were made to enforce the law. If one looks around the Dorset Street area, the quays in Dublin, Dublin suburbs such as Rathmines, or O'Connell Street, there are what in effect are illegal amusement halls now operating. I should put on the record that Dublin City Council, way back in the 1980s, revoked its resolution to adopt Part III of the 1956 Act and as a result premises on O'Connell Street, which were run by significant families with interests in the entertainment industry, were told to close down. They fought this through the courts. They said it was their business and the courts, right up to the Supreme Court, said sorry and that it was always conditional on there being resolution in place to permit the operation of these places, and they failed. When I was a youngster there was a place on O'Connell Street called Funland which was near Nelson's Pillar. Those places all closed. That was the law.

In Bray, in Bundoran and Ballybofey in County Donegal and in a few other places, which were holiday resorts, permits were in operation that were adopted by the local authorities and stated that because these were holiday resorts, it was a legitimate form of holiday entertainment and they would permit them in their areas. The great majority of the country was not the subject, geographically, of any resolution under Part III of the 1956 Act.

Now we have a situation where this Bill is simply repealing that Act. What is proposed is that the gambling commission being established under this Act will simply license these premises which are at present being operated unlawfully and in breach of the 1956 Act. I do not know what assurances the people who have invested huge sums have been given, and there are massive places in this city operating illegally. They seem to think their premises will obtain permits under this new regime when it comes through. In the meantime, nobody is trying to close them down.

It is a legitimate power for Dublin City Council to have to decide whether, in its area, there should be amusement halls - one-armed bandit places - or not. That is something a local authority should be allowed to decide. The same applies to Wicklow County Council. If it wants to allow amusement halls to continue in Bray, that is fine but if it does not want them in other places in County Wicklow, that is its decision and that is the law as it stands.

What we have now are very powerful and wealthy people who have invested huge sums of money. They are advertising in the media to operate these amusement halls. They now call them "casinos", which they did not do in the past.My point is this. There was a democratic local power, vested in local authorities, to make decisions on this. I consider this to be a largely parasitical industry, which depends on a combination of naivety, hopelessness and quasi-addiction. In working class suburbs, in particular, people are in there with buckets of money and the like and they are now given ATMs and credit card facilities in these places to get cash to operate the machines and to make the owners wealthy, because the odds are stacked against them. I believe these places should be controlled and that local people and local authorities should be given the right to determine when, whether and in what circumstances they will allow parts of their local administrative area to be used for this purpose.

Why do we have this situation in O’Connell Street? All of those places were closed in the 1980s. I remember the resolution of Dublin City Council had the active support of the then Workers’ Party members of Dublin City Council at the time. Why is it they have suddenly sprouted up again? There are social implications to them as well. The areas they are located are not posh areas – they are not in Main Street, Donnybrook. They are placed where people who are in the less privileged section of society are likely to congregate. It is an exploitation of them. This idea of operating casinos is not for the powerful and the wealthy.

I was the Minister for justice in the mid-2000s, when a new phenomenon started related to private members’ card clubs in this city. Under the pretence they were private clubs and effectively members’ clubs, gambling was permitted, even though it too was unlawful at the time. If you went into one of these places and played blackjack, under the 1956 Act, for every player, including the bankers, likely odds of winning had to be the same. This notion that there could be a croupier and table and blackjack, roulette or whatever else it was, would only be lawful if everybody sitting at the table had an equal opportunity to become the banker or the operator of the machine. Very wealthy people, who I will not name because it would be unfair, put huge pressure on the Government not to act in respect of these card clubs and invested their own money in them. I refer to very wealthy people, not amusement hall operators. Very wealthy people did that and they got away with it because, at Government level, some people felt the existing laws were overly restrictive. A group was established under a barrister called, I think, Michael McGrath, who came up with a report sometime in the 2007 to 2010 period recommending that there should be a process leading to the licensing of gambling in Ireland.

I am a liberal by disposition. I buy my lotto tickets from time to time and, very foolishly, the odd time I go to the races and lose a lot of money, but it is my choice and that is it. I have no problem, and neither did the then Minister, John O’Donoghue, who was in charge of sports and tourism at the time, supporting horse race betting as an important, integral part of a hugely important industry in Ireland. However, I do not accept that running casinos at any level in cities is a good thing. It exploits people and it exploits semi-addictive behaviour and hopelessness in many people’s lives. They go at early hours of the morning to these places. They are queuing up at 9 a.m. to get in to spend money to get poorer as the day goes on.

We also have the phenomenon of the large English bookmakers trying for a while to bring into Ireland fixed-odds betting terminals - FOBTs, as they are called. They are legal in England. Now there is a limitation on the stakes that can be inserted. These were effectively betting and gambling machines being run all over England and there was a big push to do them here, put them into every bookie shop and put them everywhere so that these people could operate. They came up with clever stratagems. Some of the English bookmaking firms said that this was a lottery, even though the result was determined online by a computer somewhere abroad. Therefore, it was not actually a gaming machine, because the machine itself did not determine the outcome. That has never been accepted in Ireland as part of Irish law.

As I said, I am a liberal. I do not mind people going to Bray, Bundoran, Ballybofey or wherever else. If they want to go to a resort where these things are available, let them do it. However, I refer to allowing what has happened in Dublin. The local authority said none of this will happen anymore in Dublin city and it revoked permission for it to happen under Part III of the 1956 Act. Other people with a lot of money simply ignored the law. An Garda Síochána made a few attempts to seize the machines used. I presume they ended up in some kind of legal wrangle. The machines that were seized were replaced and the moneymaking racket has continued.

What the amendments in my name do is as follows. Since this new Bill will repeal the Gaming and Lotteries Act 1956, the amendments are designed to say that notwithstanding that repeal, a new Part will be inserted into this statute to give local authorities the ultimate say, in the same way they have currently. If the House looks at amendments Nos. 107 to 109, they are effectively to create a simpler version of Part III of the 1956 Act as Part 4 of this Bill. The proposed new section 65 of the Bill would state that this section shall not have effect in any area unless there is for the time being in force a resolution under the section; that a local authority may, by resolution, adopt the section or rescind it; that the resolution shall not have effect unless one month’s notice of the intention of the local authority to pass it or rescind it has been published; and to provide for evidence as to whether or not such a resolution has been passed.

Amendment No. 108 provides that “Gambling in an amusement hall shall be unlawful unless the amusement hall is situated in an area [where] a resolution has been adopted by a local authority in accordance with section 65”; that “No licence shall be granted by the authority [which is the authority in this Bill] in respect of an amusement hall where gambling would be unlawful by reason of subsection (1)”; and third “...[an] ’amusement hall’ means any premises including any casino in which members of the public are permitted to gamble in person by the use of any machine or machines which are operated by means of the insertion or use of any currency (coin or note) or token or any card (including credit cards, debit cards, or charge card, or by use of any terminal (including fixed odds betting terminals) for a gambling process determined there or elsewhere".Finally, amendment No. 109 will insert a new section 67 stating, "Nothing in this Part prohibits or affects the activities of the National Lottery."

Essentially, this is intended to retain an entitlement of local authorities. We are all the time taking away the rights of local authorities. When I was Minister for justice, I gave local authorities powers to determine nightclub closing times and so on. We had local policing partnerships, which have been scrapped. Local authorities have been slowly cornered to the point where they have no function in this kind of thing, except through planning permission, and instead of that, fat cats are going to use whatever influence they have. They are going to say they have people working in these casinos now whose jobs need protection, even though they are entirely unlawful, and that they want to make money from these machines. That money is largely tax free and easily concealed and it is made, as I said, at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society. We do not see wealthy businessmen spending an hour on a stool in a place in O'Connell Street. We do not see people who are well-to-do there. It is people on the margins who are exploited in this way.

Looking generally at the Bill, while I do not want to be disorderly, it is not one to control or restrict gambling. Rather, it is a Bill to permit and encourage it. We are going down the same road as the United Kingdom, and if anybody here watches satellite TV to the extent I do, they will know that virtually everything is infected by gambling. Cat charities run bingos and donkey sanctuaries run this, that and the other. Housewives at home are told it is fun to play panda bingo, or whatever kind of bingo it is. A huge industry is going on and I believe that this Bill, by way of general comment, is to enable rather than control. Moreover, in one specific aspect, the abolition of local authorities' rights in this matter, the Bill is a step backwards. I commend amendments Nos. 107 to 109, inclusive, to the House.