Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

The amendment deals with in-person gambling. That is different from what the Minister of State is now talking about, which is online gambling. This amendment is solely concerned with in-person gambling. He should get into his car, take a little drive around Dublin and look at how many of these places there are. They are mushrooming around the city. I fully accept that the Flutters of this world are probably much more concerned with online gambling and the big English and Irish gambling industries. The people with the hundreds of millions of euro are probably much more interested in running online gambling. However, I am talking about what I see with my own eyes, which is the gambling casinos that are increasing in number and complexity and which are different because of the definition the Minister of State put in the Bill that differentiates between in-person gambling and online gambling. I am talking about in-person gambling. It is very simple for a local authority to have a say in respect of whether in-person gambling institutions should be established. They cannot control what happens online and they do not intend to do so but they can say that not every working-class suburb of Dublin requires a casino established for dubious people to rake in money from naive people who are semi-addicted to spending their few euro every week, which they cannot afford to lose, in these institutions.

We do not need them. We did not have them in Dublin but now we do. With this Bill, they are going to continue to exist. I reiterate that if you try to close one of them down on the basis that Dublin City Council has passed a resolution after the passage of this Bill saying that it does not want them anymore, you will lose in the High Court the following day.