Matt TreacyIf we have learned one thing about the Irish elite over the past week it is that they treasure the concept of privacy. 


What a chap does on his night out is his own business and nobody has any right to be interfering or even commenting on it. After all we do not want to go back to the days of the “Valley of the Squinting Windows.”

Now, the sincerity of all of this might be easier to accept if we did not have the experience of 2020 and 2021 to reference when the same people, almost to a man and woman, poo-pooed any notion that a person had the right to privacy when it came to decisions about their own or their family dependent’s health.

Some of the same people – and I will resist the temptation to juxtapose one or two of their contrasting takes on individual privacy and freedoms – had no hesitancy in advocating measures against private citizens that would not have been out of place in Shanghai or Beijing.

Enough said. Other than it forms a convenient segue into another area of private behaviour that the state seeks to regulate. And once again, it is the left who are predictably seeking to extend that regulation just as they did during the Covid Panic. I am referring to the Gambling Regulation Bill (2022) that reached its second stage in the Dáil last Tuesday.

The Bill, as introduced by Minister of State James Browne, seeks to amend the legislation governing betting in order to “protect people from falling prey to addiction.” Which begs a number of questions; firstly, whether it is the business of the state at all to protect people from themselves, which is what they are proposing to do.

It also raises the question as to what constitutes addiction in the first place or whether such a concept is valid. As someone who drank to excess, I can pretty much claim to have some “lived experience” in this area and believe that drinking too much is a bad habit, and that like all bad habits it is something that the individual, if they so choose, can change.

I certainly don’t believe that anyone else was responsible for my bad habit and certainly not that the majority of people who drink without it becoming a bad or harmful habit ought to be punished by charging them more, closing pubs, banning advertising or even making them feel guilty about their drinking or responsible for those of us who could not drink sensibly.

The same applies to betting. Huge numbers of people bet in Ireland and throughout the world, even in totalitarian states such as China where it is illegal. Indeed, the fact that that monstrous regime regards betting as another area of human activity to be controlled and banned ought to give pause for thought. Maybe even to the devotees of an allegedly “kinder” version of the same ideology.

Of the numbers who bet in Ireland, the Health Research Board, as quoted by several TDs during the Dáil debate, estimate that there are 12,000 problem gamblers. That, in the wider scheme of things, is a small number of people. Less than 0.25% of the population. No one doubts that such individuals may cause misery for themselves and their dependents when that problem is of major dimensions, but as with my and others bad drinking habits, their situation is not going to be changed by anyone other than themselves. It is not anyone else’s responsibility, neither the state’s nor betting folk in general, to change other people’s bad habits.

To put the problem into wider context, the British Gambling Commission which has driven a similar campaign against betting there, found that problem gamblers account for 0.7% and cited statistics from the United States of 0.4%. Significantly, there is a much higher, although still small, proportion of problem gamblers among those who use slot machines and various other electronic or online games of chance.

Sports betting is different and while Deputy Alan Farrell believes that it is only recently become a “ubiquitous part of sport in Ireland” he might check out the many references in both Irish popular culture and world culture to discover that betting has always been an intrinsic part of sport. Indeed, it is quite likely that the first organised sports were for the purposes of some wager or other.

There was also some confusion on the part of contributors to the Dáil debate who appear to be under the impression that all of the money spent on betting represents a loss. (Well, as the chap said, I wouldn’t mind laying their selections on the exchange.) Which of course is not true. As evidence of this, while billions of Euros are cited as losses here, the main Irish bookmaker Paddy Power posted profits of €91 million in 2021 and their reach goes well beyond Ireland.

In horse racing, the bookmaker can expect to make an average profit of around 10%. That is based on the built in % that theoretically guarantees that the “bookie always wins.” Of course as with all other statistics the average over the famous long run can cover all sorts of short term anomalies. If the favourite wins the Grand National, and the next three horses in the betting fill the places, then the bookie will lose, often heavily. Likewise, as when last year at Aintree this year the favourite got chinned late by a 50/1 outsider, then they make way more than 10%.

The same applies to punters. Most punters are small stakes players and win or lose a small amount. Then there are a small number of people who lose a lot – usually people who can well afford to and who bet in large sums as a form of pleasure, and a small number of people who make a good living out of betting. Others make smaller profits. Others slightly larger losses than the Saturday Lucky 15 punter who is bound to lose because it is a stupid bet if you are serious about making a few bob over the long term.

As is the lottery and yet the National Lottery here is going to be given exemptions from most of the legislation for no other reason than that the state benefits from it. So do local communities, but that is not the point. For as John McGuirk pointed out here last month, not only are the chances of winning anything abysmally small compared to sports betting, but the sums spent on the lotto are huge and the vast majority of that does constitute a loss to the punters, way out of proportion to the % losses of people who bet on horses or soccer or rugby.

Finally, and to return to where I began, all of this relates to the new puritanism of the sanctimonious liberal left. They viciously approve of libertarianism when it applies to things they approve of. When it comes to other things, like betting, their tone as evinced by some of them in the debate is of condescending disapproval.

Louise O’Reilly loftily declared that she failed to see what relevance betting has to sport but that she supposed that “it has some relevance for some people.” Well, that is all she needs to know. The lesson she ought take from that is to mind her own business. No TD was ever elected to tell people how to manage their betting, or their drinking or their eating. The sooner some of them realise that the better. Especially given all the other exemptions they allow for a person’s private business, even when conducted in public.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

Gambling Bill Provides Another Outlet For The New Puritans

Matt TreacyIf we have learned one thing about the Irish elite over the past week it is that they treasure the concept of privacy. 


What a chap does on his night out is his own business and nobody has any right to be interfering or even commenting on it. After all we do not want to go back to the days of the “Valley of the Squinting Windows.”

Now, the sincerity of all of this might be easier to accept if we did not have the experience of 2020 and 2021 to reference when the same people, almost to a man and woman, poo-pooed any notion that a person had the right to privacy when it came to decisions about their own or their family dependent’s health.

Some of the same people – and I will resist the temptation to juxtapose one or two of their contrasting takes on individual privacy and freedoms – had no hesitancy in advocating measures against private citizens that would not have been out of place in Shanghai or Beijing.

Enough said. Other than it forms a convenient segue into another area of private behaviour that the state seeks to regulate. And once again, it is the left who are predictably seeking to extend that regulation just as they did during the Covid Panic. I am referring to the Gambling Regulation Bill (2022) that reached its second stage in the Dáil last Tuesday.

The Bill, as introduced by Minister of State James Browne, seeks to amend the legislation governing betting in order to “protect people from falling prey to addiction.” Which begs a number of questions; firstly, whether it is the business of the state at all to protect people from themselves, which is what they are proposing to do.

It also raises the question as to what constitutes addiction in the first place or whether such a concept is valid. As someone who drank to excess, I can pretty much claim to have some “lived experience” in this area and believe that drinking too much is a bad habit, and that like all bad habits it is something that the individual, if they so choose, can change.

I certainly don’t believe that anyone else was responsible for my bad habit and certainly not that the majority of people who drink without it becoming a bad or harmful habit ought to be punished by charging them more, closing pubs, banning advertising or even making them feel guilty about their drinking or responsible for those of us who could not drink sensibly.

The same applies to betting. Huge numbers of people bet in Ireland and throughout the world, even in totalitarian states such as China where it is illegal. Indeed, the fact that that monstrous regime regards betting as another area of human activity to be controlled and banned ought to give pause for thought. Maybe even to the devotees of an allegedly “kinder” version of the same ideology.

Of the numbers who bet in Ireland, the Health Research Board, as quoted by several TDs during the Dáil debate, estimate that there are 12,000 problem gamblers. That, in the wider scheme of things, is a small number of people. Less than 0.25% of the population. No one doubts that such individuals may cause misery for themselves and their dependents when that problem is of major dimensions, but as with my and others bad drinking habits, their situation is not going to be changed by anyone other than themselves. It is not anyone else’s responsibility, neither the state’s nor betting folk in general, to change other people’s bad habits.

To put the problem into wider context, the British Gambling Commission which has driven a similar campaign against betting there, found that problem gamblers account for 0.7% and cited statistics from the United States of 0.4%. Significantly, there is a much higher, although still small, proportion of problem gamblers among those who use slot machines and various other electronic or online games of chance.

Sports betting is different and while Deputy Alan Farrell believes that it is only recently become a “ubiquitous part of sport in Ireland” he might check out the many references in both Irish popular culture and world culture to discover that betting has always been an intrinsic part of sport. Indeed, it is quite likely that the first organised sports were for the purposes of some wager or other.

There was also some confusion on the part of contributors to the Dáil debate who appear to be under the impression that all of the money spent on betting represents a loss. (Well, as the chap said, I wouldn’t mind laying their selections on the exchange.) Which of course is not true. As evidence of this, while billions of Euros are cited as losses here, the main Irish bookmaker Paddy Power posted profits of €91 million in 2021 and their reach goes well beyond Ireland.

In horse racing, the bookmaker can expect to make an average profit of around 10%. That is based on the built in % that theoretically guarantees that the “bookie always wins.” Of course as with all other statistics the average over the famous long run can cover all sorts of short term anomalies. If the favourite wins the Grand National, and the next three horses in the betting fill the places, then the bookie will lose, often heavily. Likewise, as when last year at Aintree this year the favourite got chinned late by a 50/1 outsider, then they make way more than 10%.

The same applies to punters. Most punters are small stakes players and win or lose a small amount. Then there are a small number of people who lose a lot – usually people who can well afford to and who bet in large sums as a form of pleasure, and a small number of people who make a good living out of betting. Others make smaller profits. Others slightly larger losses than the Saturday Lucky 15 punter who is bound to lose because it is a stupid bet if you are serious about making a few bob over the long term.

As is the lottery and yet the National Lottery here is going to be given exemptions from most of the legislation for no other reason than that the state benefits from it. So do local communities, but that is not the point. For as John McGuirk pointed out here last month, not only are the chances of winning anything abysmally small compared to sports betting, but the sums spent on the lotto are huge and the vast majority of that does constitute a loss to the punters, way out of proportion to the % losses of people who bet on horses or soccer or rugby.

Finally, and to return to where I began, all of this relates to the new puritanism of the sanctimonious liberal left. They viciously approve of libertarianism when it applies to things they approve of. When it comes to other things, like betting, their tone as evinced by some of them in the debate is of condescending disapproval.

Louise O’Reilly loftily declared that she failed to see what relevance betting has to sport but that she supposed that “it has some relevance for some people.” Well, that is all she needs to know. The lesson she ought take from that is to mind her own business. No TD was ever elected to tell people how to manage their betting, or their drinking or their eating. The sooner some of them realise that the better. Especially given all the other exemptions they allow for a person’s private business, even when conducted in public.

Matt Treacy has published a number of books including histories of 
the Republican Movement and of the Communist Party of Ireland. 

2 comments:

  1. The States in Australia dropped objections to gambling like a hot spud when they seen the revenue roll in once One-Armed Bandits (Pokies) were allowed into pubs en masse. Always back self interest, at least you can be sure it's trying.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This can only hold good when applied across the board - the same laissez-faire approach on the part of the state has to equally apply to physician assisted dying, morning after pill, gay marriage, sex changes. If it what we want no matter how harmful to ourselves that might be in the eyes of others, the choice is our own and the rest can mind their own business.
    I don't actually agree with that perspective but it is where it has to go if the suggestion is authentic and not "ideological".

    ReplyDelete