Online gambling - It’s too easy to become an addict

Once upon a time a man’s home, or a woman’s, was their castle. It was as inviolable and secure a place as most people knew. Today it seems that, in too many instances, internet access has made a person’s home a branch office of whatever business feeds off the individual’s addiction.

Foremost amongst these businesses is online gambling, worth €44bn — and growing — globally each year. The very nature of the business makes it difficult to establish how much of that is based in Ireland, but addiction experts trying to pick up the pieces of broken lives estimate that Irish people lose up to €2bn a year through home gambling. That figure is in addition to the traditional, on-course or bookies’ shops gambling.

A brief look at the figures for Paddy Power, the country’s largest bookmaker, confirms the phenomenal growth in this area. The company has nearly one million active online customers and last year 62% of its €120m operating profit came through online operations. Is it any wonder that the company’s share price has grown by 208% in six years?

In a time of retrenchment, denial, and austerity, this sector is an exception — a quickly growing business generating real, enviable profits. Despite our great need — and desire — to celebrate achievement, it is unfortunate that this success is tainted by so many blighted lives. Gambling businesses like to present themselves as part of the entertainment industry and, in the great majority of instances, that is the case. However, this success, the success of any company whose business is gambling, is based to some degree on compulsion.

This is confirmed by the fact that there has been a spectacular rise in the number of young men — aged 18 to 35 — who have sought help with a gambling addiction. Tabor Lodge, one of the largest treatment centres in the south of the country, has recorded a 50% increase in this category in two years, and believes that online betting is a huge contributory factor. So pervasive are these websites that, according to Stephen Rowan, director of the Toranfield House treatment centre in Wicklow, about 75% of those who gamble online are problem gamblers.

This surge has increased the demand for the services of Gamblers Anonymous. In Waterford city, there are up to five meetings a week — up from just one meeting a week three years ago. This trend is replicated across the country.

Like so many issues generated by the internet, this one stands at the intersection of personal rights and social responsibility. Does society have an obligation, or even a right, to intervene in an individual’s life if that person’s behaviour is self-destructive? Does society have an obligation to confront a business whose success is based on replacing free will with addiction? One thing is certain in this equation, though — there will always be businesses, and not just gambling businesses, ready to exploit the vulnerabilities of an addicted customer.

It is also certain that the internet has changed our world in such a dramatic and usually positive way that we will have to work out how to manage its less attractive side more effectively than we do.