Opinion: when it comes to dealing with the gambling industry, the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland may find enforcement a challenge
Last night, the Gambling Regulation Bill 2022 was passed by Dáil Éireann. Its reforms include a prohibition on gambling advertising between 5.30am and 9pm and the establishment of a social impact fund to raise awareness of compulsive and excessive gambling.
The Bill also proposes to establish the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland (GRAI), a body charged with a swathe of functions, including the licensing, supervision and control of gambling activities within the State, the maintenance of a national self-exclusion register, and monitoring and enforcing compliance by licensed operators.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1’s Late Debate, does the Gambling Regulation Bill do enough to curb problem gambling?
With approximately one in 30 Irish adults exhibiting problematic gambling behaviour, one of the most important responsibilities of the new authority will be to take measures to protect vulnerable problem gamblers. This is characterised by gambling beyond one’s means, a preoccupation with gambling and the inability to abstain from gambling despite the harms it inflicts.
It is a particularly tragic phenomenon, associated in one way or another with profound financial difficulties (including debt and bankruptcy), depression and anxiety, and suicide. Its harms often surpass the individual, affecting the sufferer’s family and friends and imposing societal costs through lost work hours, the need to fund treatment and so on.
The challenge posed by problem gambling is exacerbated by its prevalence; the “1-in-30” figure recently published by the Economic and Social Research Institute provides a stark reminder that problem gambling is not a marginal issue in Irish society, confined to an unfortunate few. Rather, it is a “public health crisis”, as Minister of State at the Department of Justice James Browne TD remarked in a Dáil debate in April.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1’s Drivetime, Minister of State at the Department of Justice James Browne on the new gambling legislation
The discourse around the Bill demonstrates a promising awareness of the need to address this public health crisis. Though it dispenses with the category of “vulnerable persons” present in its 2018 predecessor, its long title identifies one of its purposes as being to “eliminate or reduce compulsive and excessive gambling”.
A withdrawn amendment proposed by Senators Lynn Ruane and Alice-Mary Higgins would have codified the need “to take measures to reduce or eliminate compulsive and problem gambling” as a function of the GRAI. Even without this, the proposed authority appears cognisant of its role in addressing problem gambling. In an interview with RTÉ News in October 2023, Anne Marie Caulfield, the authority’s CEO-designate, identified the protection of problem gamblers as a “very strong theme in the draft legislation.”
A conspicuous example of the Bill’s commitment to protecting problem gamblers is its introduction of a national self-exclusion register. In short, self-exclusion is a device whereby a problem gambler may request to be prevented from gambling for some future period. The Bill accordingly enshrines a requirement for operators not to provide access to gambling services to a self-excluded person or to communicate with such a person in a way which might invite them to gamble. While it is important not to exaggerate self-exclusion’s effectiveness, research has consistently shown it to be at least somewhat effective in reducing gambling frequency and intensity and alleviating certain problem gambling symptoms.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1’s Drivetime, interview with the Gambling Regulator-designate Anne Marie Caulfield
It is important not to adopt an overly rosy perspective on these proposed reforms. While the desire to protect problem gamblers is encouraging, the vital ingredient of ensuring industry compliance cannot be taken for granted. The gambling industry’s revenue is, unsurprisingly, drawn disproportionately from problem gamblers and it therefore has a strong financial incentive not to act in addicted gamblers’ best interests.
There are many examples of distasteful industry activity in this vein, including capitalising on research from the cognitive sciences and employing AI algorithms to keep gamblers hooked. The incentive for non-compliance is especially pronounced in the case of self-exclusion. In short, turning away a self-excluded gambler is, in the words of a House of Lords Select Committee, contrary to the industry’s “natural commercial desire to maximise profit.”
The gap between a regulatory desire to protect problem gamblers and an industry desire to exploit them can only be bridged by enforcement sanctions. To this end, the proposed authority is empowered – albeit subject to an admittedly complicated process – to levy financial penalties (capped at the greater of 10% of an operator’s annual turnover or €20m), suspend or revoke an operator’s licence, and impose conditions on an operator’s licence.
Only time will tell, but the experience of the UK Gambling Commission illustrates how the Irish body must adopt a proactive, dynamic and research-driven approach to enforcement
However, the Gambling Commission in the UK has enforcement powers commensurate with the new Irish authority and findings there indicate that enforcement is not a simple formula of imposing sanctions and thereby generating compliance. In one 2017 enforcement action by the UK’s Gambling Commission, for example, 888 UK Limited incurred a then-record fine of £7.8m for serious social responsibility failures, including a widespread and prolonged failure to prevent self-excluded persons from gambling and a failure to identify the disordered gambling of a particularly acute problem gambler. Undeterred, the same operator was fined £9.4m in 2022 for failures in their social responsibility and anti-money laundering duties.
Though the operator’s social responsibility breaches in the latter instance were not related to self-exclusion, they were related to similar shortcomings in respect of their duty to vulnerable consumers. As such, the inability of a £7.8m fine to curtail a gambling operator’s non-compliance suggests that financial penalties may be insufficient to induce operators to comply with their duties to problem gamblers.
It is an uncertain time in the Irish gambling regulation domain. While the new Bill answers longstanding calls for a regulator, it is unclear whether the authority will be able to tame the harmful and incorrigible gambling industry. Only time will tell, but the experience of the UK Gambling Commission illustrates how the Irish body must adopt a proactive, dynamic and research-driven approach to enforcement. In particular, it must be willing to impose meaningful sanctions, including exercising its power to suspend and revoke operating licences when financial sanctions fail to produce compliance.
Follow RTÉ Brainstorm on WhatsApp and Instagram for more stories and updates
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
