JOHN S DOYLEreviews The Irish SweepBy Marie Coleman University College Dublin Press 302pp, €60/€28

IT IS not widely known now that for nearly 60 years the building and equipping of hospitals in Ireland was largely paid for by American and British people buying tickets for a horse race.

Marie Coleman’s history of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake gives a fascinating picture of mid-20th century Ireland – still somewhat closed off from the world and with economic activity sluggish. An Irish get-rich-quick scheme had romantic, not to say illicit, connotations abroad, and produced beneficial results for the health system at home, as well as providing employment for 4,000 clerical workers at Ballsbridge. The quickest to get rich were the sweepstake’s promoters, who enjoyed wealth beyond the conceiving of most of their fellow citizens.

There were three promoters – Joseph McGrath, a veteran of the War of Independence and former government minister; Spencer Freeman, a Welsh engineer and captain in the British army during the first World War; and Richard Duggan, a bookmaker who had run a number of illegal sweeps during the 1910s and 1920s.

The Sweep, as it was known, came into being in 1930 at the request of seven Dublin hospitals who saw it as the only way to raise funds – in particular the National Maternity Hospital, which was on the brink of closure.

The Sweep, run on major English horse races, had immediate success in a world suffering from economic depression: 142 million tickets were sold during the 1930s, amounting to £71 million, a staggering sum at the time and most of it raised by illegal sales in the US and Britain. Prizewinners shared £45 million of that, the hospitals received £13.5 million, and the promoters’ personal profit was £1.6 million.

Spencer Freeman had a talent for publicity, and the draw was a big event, staged with pageantry – the book has some wonderful photographs of these slightly sinister-looking parades, where the Sweep workers, dressed in hunting costume, carried the ticket counterfoils in coffin-like chests through the streets of Dublin. The huge drum in which the tickets were mixed was a popular backdrop for visiting celebrities’ photographs.

Marie Coleman’s carefully researched book is a work of history – she is a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast – and so a little dry for anyone who might like to find out more about the social and personal side of things, perhaps of the legendary McGraths, for example.

But she shows how the illegality of sweepstakes in the US fed into a general sense of bending the rules (the American operation was controlled by two men with close links to the IRA; and the Irish postal service connived in getting around obstacles). And a clear picture emerges of how the Sweep, a private company once too big to be disciplined, became an embarrassment to the State whose legislation allowed it a lax attitude to accounting.

The business had peaked by 1973, when Joe MacAnthony published his famous 8,000-word investigation in the Sunday Independent. The article can be read online at www.mediabite.org (the promoters survived; the journalist moved to Canada).

By the time the Sweep closed, in 1987, the Irish exchequer had received £170 million, which paid for a modern hospital system. But as Coleman points out, there was an opportunity missed – by the hospitals, the State and the Sweep – for a comprehensive reform, proposed in the 1930s but only achieved after 60 years.

John S Doyle is a freelance journalist