A growing addiction - A gamble that’s worth the risk

LAST year we gambled something around €6 billion at racecourses, in bookies’ shops, in casinos, on the net or by just buying Lotto tickets.

You do not need to be able to understand what the workings of an underground hadron collider might do for our appreciation of our little globule’s place in this universe to work out that that represents €1,500 for every citizen of this small Republic.

It also, in a neat piece of symmetry considering the chaos caused by the failure of so many gambles on international financial markets, more or less matches the shortfall in government revenues expected this year.