Should we be concerned about online gambling?
YES:
Gambling has doubled in Ireland in the past five years. The forms and availability of gambling have spread markedly, as have advertising and visibility. The current official position in Ireland is largely to support gambling as an industry. The Horse and Greyhound Racing Fund provides approximately €80 million a year from public funds to support the horse and greyhound racing industry. This is partly, of course, to encourage the breeding and tourist industries, but also clearly to directly support gambling as a hobby.
Betting taxes have been reduced successively over the last number of years and there are far fewer restrictions on the advertising and availability of gambling than in Continental countries.
The question is whether our support for gambling has gone too far, creating a major problem that we are actively fostering, and whether it is time to temper this support with an awareness of the potentially negative side effects. Recent initiatives in the US, such as banning most forms of internet gambling, show that other countries have decided enough is enough when it comes to the harmful aspects of gambling. This stands in marked contrast to our own position of low regulation, even up to the point of active support. Who is right?
There are clearly potentially damaging aspects to gambling behaviour. Firstly, gambling is different from normal consumer pastimes in that there is strong evidence that it has addictive features that can cascade into mental-health problems and, at extreme levels, suicidal behaviour. Secondly, gambling involves financial losses that often affect the families of the gamblers as much as the gamblers themselves. Furthermore, hard gamblers are vulnerable to cues in their environment, and the continuous and unrelenting exposure to gambling creates a context where self-control becomes increasingly frayed.
There is also concern that the increased linkage of sport and gambling advertising is creating mindsets among people whereby normal pastimes can only be enjoyed in the context of addictive behaviour. On a wider level, gambling may have damaging effects on sporting activity in that it increases the incentive to engage in cheating. All across the world in recent years, scandals have occurred in sport due to the amounts of money being gambled on events, with entire sports being damaged by such activity.
How to deal with these features of gambling is a key question for the discussion of policy. With regard to regulation, it is clear that gambling activity that creates illegal interference with sport should be heavily punished, and few would argue with this. However, with respect to personal gambling, it is arguable that individuals should not be restrained from pursuing gambling as a leisure activity, as this interferes with their right to choose their own lifestyles.
As well as this, regulation itself can be costly to enforce and can distort behaviour in unpredictable ways. It creates submarkets and opportunities for corruption. It denies people a pleasurable pastime and drives companies out of business. Badly framed regulation can force companies to engage in fruitless compliance that keeps to the letter of the regulation while having no societal benefit. It involves potentially criminalising otherwise upstanding members of society for engaging in what they perceive to be a hobby. In summary, strict regulation of individual behaviour is not costless and should not be entered into lightly.
At the least, though, making people aware of risks and openly debating the pros and cons of gambling should be explored as a light form of regulation of the industry. However, there is suspicion that awareness campaigns do not have sufficient power to generate behavioural change, particularly among people who have formed deep habits over the course of their lifetime. In many cases, more direct approaches are needed if the desired outcome is to reduce harm, and none of these have been discussed fully in the Irish context.
Rather than base this on opinion, we need to become aware of how gambling problems are formed and the extent to which they are fostered by the mushrooming of the availability of gambling, particularly casino and internet gambling, and whether regulation would actually be effective.
Surveys in other countries suggest that about 1-2 per cent of the population display symptoms of problematic gambling such as lying, stealing, "chasing losses" and other potentially damaging behaviours.
To date, there have been no serious proposals to restrict the influence of gambling on sport, and this seems at odds with practice in other domains. Similarly, there have been no serious proposals on the restriction of internet gambling. Nor has there been active discussion of the responsibility of the industry and Government bodies for financial losses among families, which will result from the increasing support and development of gambling in Ireland. We are nowhere near answering these questions, but such debates are timely.
Liam Delaney is a senior researcher at the UCD Geary Institute and a lecturer at the UCD school of economics and UCD school of public health and population science
