Gambling is a ticking time bomb and we can't ignore it any longer

Irish Examiner

27-05-2025

After years of burying our heads in the sand on what a massive problem gambling is in this country, the last few years have seen a step change in our understanding of the issue.
This is in no small part down to the country's first gambling regulator.
Even though it was only formally established earlier this year, it spent the years prior in the background, commissioning the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) to delve into the extent of the problem.
Its reports make for sobering reading. And shows just how much Ireland has to do to catch up on what experts have described as a 'public health emergency'.
Even just take the headline findings: 'One in 30 adults in Ireland suffers from problem gambling — 10 times higher than previously thought.' Take your class at school, and at least one of them has a gambling problem.
A more recent study reported 'strong links between childhood experiences of gambling and problem gambling in adulthood.'
Britain got its regulator nearly 20 years ago tasked with holding to account what was then a growing industry, where the traditional betting shop was beginning to be superseded by gambling apps on our phones — essentially a casino in all of our pockets.
In 2025, it's a multi-billion euro industry embedded into every facet of sport around the world. For a very long time now, watching a football game has meant being bombarded with gambling adverts during the game itself and in the ad breaks.
You can 'build' your own bets now for what you think will happen in a football game. Sitting around watching a game in a pub with friends, and you'll inevitably hear someone who says he needs one player to have two shots, another player to commit two fouls and another to get a yellow card. The fiver he put on it might get him a few hundred euro.
And this is normal now. It's how so many people engage with the sports they grew up loving. Through betting.
Anne Marie Caulfield is the CEO of the newly established Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland. Picture: GRAI
Of course, for many people, it's a relatively harmless hobby. They're up and they're down, and they may have a good time riding those waves.
But what we have seen as the regulator tasked with holding these companies to account finally gets its powers, is how much harm it's doing too.
And how wary we need to be about the impact the availability and promotion of gambling is having on younger generations.
Last week, the latest European School Survey Project on Alcohol and Other Drugs was published. It surveyed 114,000 students aged 15-16 across 37 European countries including Ireland last year.
While it found the use of cannabis, cigarettes, and alcohol is falling among Irish teens, gambling is on the rise: 29.1% of Irish people in that age group had gambled in the last year. This was an increase from 24% in 2019.
To be clear, it's illegal for children to gamble. But they are doing so anyway. And we have those studies now that link exposure to gambling in childhood to problem gambling later in life. There's even a link between gaming and gambling, according to recent research.
The ESRI said there was a strong correlation between online gaming in older teenagers and online gambling and gambling frequency by the age of 20.
The researchers said there is increasing concern among parents, researchers, and policy makers about the availability of gambling in modern life. They also noted there has been a greater gamblification of gaming through the introduction of loot boxes, skins, and social casino games in recent years which did not exist two decades ago.
'Given the rapidly evolving nature of online gaming and gambling, ongoing monitoring of these behaviours in younger and older cohorts is crucial,' the researchers said.
Issuing its reaction to the European statistics, the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland made clear that protecting children is firmly within its remit and is something it takes very seriously.
'One of the principle aims of the Gambling Regulation Act is to protect young people from the harms of gambling,' it said.
Child protection is one of the key principles of the Gambling Regulation Act 2024, and will therefore be a major focus of our work. The act has not yet been fully commenced, but when it is Ireland will have the heaviest penalties in the EU for allowing children to engage in gambling.
When that act is fully commenced, an entity allowing a child to gamble could face an eight-year jail term. It will also be an offence for gambling companies to target children with branded clothes and merchandise.
An advertising watershed will also come in, similar to what's in place now for alcohol, where gambling adverts will be banned on TV and radio between the hours of 5.30am and 9pm.
And, unlike the alcohol industry which has skillfully evaded advertising curbs by pushing their 0.0 products, it does appear there is little leeway for the gambling companies to perform similar feats to still push their products on TV during the day.
And the penalties for breaching the laws could be significant. Financial sanctions can reach up to €20m or 10% of a company's turnover, whichever is higher. In the UK, some of the big betting firms are routinely fined millions of pounds for breaching the law. It remains to be seen if we will see the same here.
On a recent trip to the US for work, it was astonishing to see how much the betting industry has gotten its claws into young men, in particular, as online gambling has surged in popularity there.
With top celebrities on their gambling ads pushing these products, it did beg the question of whether America will regret allowing online gambling to proliferate so much there unimpeded.
It's a ticking public health time bomb. And one this country can't ignore.
Ireland has gotten plenty of new quangos in recent years tasked with holding sectors making billions of euro to account.
Coimisiún na Meán is tasked with regulating the big social media firms based here, and at a recent press conference one of its top officials diplomatically said there'd been 'pushback' by some of these companies to being regulated, similar to the experience of the Data Protection Commission, which operates in a similar sphere.
Both of those regulators can dish out massive fines, as can the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland.
What its own research and the recent European figures show is that finally getting to grips with problem gambling in Ireland could not be more urgent.