Today with David McCullagh
National Lottery urging Government to stop bookmakers taking bets on its draws
28 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the National Lottery asking the government to ban?
The National Lottery is asking the government to ban what it's calling a secondary lotto market online and in bookies. New research being published today by the lottery operator claims that the practice is leading to the loss of millions of euro in funding for good causes across the country. The National Lottery is also...
worried that under new licensing from the Gambling Regulatory Authority, the practice could become legalised. In a moment, we'll be speaking to chairperson of the Irish Bookmakers Association, Sharon Byrne, and to the principal investigator of the Tobacco, Alcohol and Gambling Research Group at the Technological University of the Shannon, Dr Frank Houghton. But first,
I'm joined by political correspondent with the Irish Times, Jack Horgan-Jones. Jack, you've been writing about this morning a ban on betting on the lottery.
Chapter 2: How much money is lost to the secondary market in lottery betting?
What exactly are the National Lottery asking of government?
Morning, David. Yeah, it's a fairly all-guns-blazing attack on the practice of this so-called secondary market in lottery betting that is coming from the National Lottery. And the numbers involved are pretty seismic, actually. I was kind of really taken aback when I was reading the research yesterday
And they were describing the scale of betting that goes on through bookmakers and online on the National Lottery, but not on the National Lottery proper. They say that the total market is worth about 828 million euros every year and that they think that if
that market didn't exist, about 35% of that money would make its way to the national lottery and that works out to something in the region of 289 million euros of which they say 81 million euros would make its way to good causes were it not spent in bookmakers. They're effectively asking the government to ban the practice outright and they are worried that the first raft of gambling licenses
which are going to be issued later this year by the regulatory authority, will make it in effect legal. They're saying it's currently operating in a space where it's neither illegal or explicitly legal in a kind of grey zone. And they think that if it was to be made fully legal, it would grow and you'd have bookmakers investing in more advertising, more kind of product innovation and
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Chapter 3: What concerns does the National Lottery have about new gambling regulations?
it would go from a space where effectively it's in and around the same size as the National Lottery now. Again, a fairly stark statistic there to a place where it could actually be significantly larger.
828 million is a hell of a lot of money.
It is. So apparently the amount of money that is spent through retailers every year on the lottery, so that would be your supermarket or your newsagent, is something like 700 million. So I'm presuming there's a bit more spent on the National Lottery proper online, which takes up to more than the 828 million.
But just the fact that you have a kind of secondary or synthetic market of this scale is quite significant. They're also, they being the National Lottery, are also citing research that they've done, which suggests that a fair amount of people who play in the bookmakers or in online bookmakers, they actually believe that they're playing the National Lottery itself.
Okay. And you've seen the research, have you?
I have, yeah. It's done by Indicon, the economic consultancy.
Okay. And is there any indication yet from government about whether they're disposed to look kindly at this? Because I think it is a measure that Britain has introduced and 25 of the EU member states have introduced.
Yeah, so most of the kind of comparison jurisdictions would have looked at this and in the national lotteries telling anyway they've decided to go ahead and ban it. And there are a few different ways of doing that. You can do it by primary legislation, so introducing fresh laws through the Oireachtas or through regulation.
It is something that the political system writ large, if not the government, has looked at in the past. Back in 2018, the now Justice Minister, Jim O'Callaghan, tried to introduce a private member's bill on this and more recently in the SeƔnad
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