Colin Sheridan: Bookies provide a social sanctuary in towns and villages

The 'turf accountants' was a room that welcomed those who prefer their community quiet and their dreams at €5 each 

Paddy Power will shut almost one in 10 of its shops — 28 in the Republic, one in the North, and 28 in the UK. Picture: Denis Minihane

They used to call them ‘turf accountants’, which is a bit like calling a pub a ‘hydration consultancy’. 

Yet the euphemism always felt apt: you walked in with a handful of hopes and walked out with a receipt. Accounted for — if not always reconciled.

This week’s news that Paddy Power will shut almost one in 10 of its shops — 28 in the Republic, one in the North, and 28 in the UK — landed like a dull thud on the lino floors of our high streets. 

They cited all the usual reasons: rising costs and shifting habits in an online world. 

But to many towns it reads like something else: the disappearance of a room that was never grand, rarely pretty, but somehow important.

The scourge of gambling is real. I’ll come back to that, because you can’t write about bookies without acknowledging the harm. 

But first, the awkward truth: the betting shop has been a small social sanctuary for people who don’t much like sanctuaries. 

The betting shop is a public living room

It’s a public living room where no one asks why you’re there. The rules are clear, the conversation optional. There is commentary, but rarely judgement. 

A man in a flat cap studies the form as if decoding the Enigma machine. A woman at the terminal taps in an exacta with the precision of a pharmacist. 

The TV mutters; someone coughs; nobody claps. And yet, community happens — quietly, undemonstratively.

I learned the sociology of the shop long before I grasped the maths of the odds. The regulars — many elderly — had a rhythm. 

You’d see them three times a week: the walk, the chat, the flutter, the ritual win or lose shrug. For some, it was the day’s anchor. 

Not a church or a club, but a place where time made a bit of sense: race times slicing the afternoon into neat, comprehensible pieces.

The digital bookmaker in our pockets has turned the physical one into a curiosity. 

Paddy Power’s parent, Flutter, can do their sums: more punters online, fewer walking through a door that needs heating, lighting, staffing, rent. 

The future of gambling has a loading bar and terms and conditions; the old shop has a biro on a string. Guess which one beats the odds.

Problem gamblers

We should be honest about the harm behind the romance. 

The Health Research Board (HRB) estimated that, in 2019–20, about half of adults gambled in the previous year, but the headline is in the risk: roughly 12,000 adults met the criteria for problem gambling, with far more in the low- and moderate-risk categories. 

An ESRI study using an online sample put problem gambling higher — around 3.3% — a figure not directly comparable but sobering all the same. 

Financial trouble comes first; shame lags close behind. And online is where the money is flowing. 

The HRB notes that gross gambling revenue was about €2bn in 2022, with online accounting for just under half; industry trackers project online gambling revenue around €1.2 - €1.3bn for 2024-25 and growing, even if modestly by international standards.

So what, exactly, is being lost when a shop closes? Not the ability to place a bet — that is, emphatically, alive and pinging in your palm. 

What’s lost is friction. You had to put on a coat and physically walk somewhere. Face a human. The internet removed the awkward steps that sometimes saved us from ourselves. 

Even the small indignities of the shop — the queue, the glance, the ‘are you sure?’ — acted as speed bumps. 

The algorithm knows your weaknesses

Now the road is smooth, the limit high, and the algorithm knows your weaknesses better than you do.

But let’s not airbrush the shop into a sepia-toned refuge. It could be grim. It could be lonely in company. 

You could watch a man lose too much in real time and know that the rest of his day would be a long, unlit tunnel. 

If a town’s ‘third place’ is a bookies, that’s not a triumph of community planning. It’s a failure of imagination.

Which is why the new regulator’s job matters. 

The Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland — finally in place — has the mandate to set guardrails: a proper exclusion register, tighter ad rules (especially around minors), real-time harm checks, and a Social Impact Fund that’s more than a slogan. 

The question isn’t whether people will gamble; it’s how we stop the few from falling off a cliff, and how we stop the rest of us from inching closer to it while convinced we’re just ‘having a go’. 

In the meantime, the shop’s slow fade invites a more basic civic question: when we eliminate the awkward places where strangers stand near each other for no particular reason, what replaces them? 

If you’ve ever sat in a waiting room and felt less alone because there were other people also waiting, you’ll know what I mean.

The betting shop — at its best — was a waiting room for the uncertain. It gave people who were shy of other people a way to be with other people. 

There was also comedy. The quips and the craic you could never contrive. 

The parish philosopher who placed a bet on long-range weather. The man who only ever bet names that sounded like ex-girlfriends, healing his heart one lost tenner at a time. 

We will miss that peculiar theatre: the choreography of hope and hindsight.

So, yes: close the shops that don’t make sense; protect the jobs where you can; fund the supports without euphemism. 

But also notice what’s evaporating. Not the vice — never the vice — but the venue. A room that welcomed those who prefer their community quiet and their dreams at €5 each.

When the shutters finally come down on the last high-street ‘turf accountant’, I hope we’ll have found other rooms for the unhurried, low-stakes company of strangers.

Libraries, men’s sheds, community cafés. Places where the only thing at risk is conversation.

Because while gambling takes, belonging gives. And any town worth living in needs more of the latter — receipts optional.