METHODISTS HAVE hit out at plans to build a casino in Two-Mile-Borris, Co Tipperary, saying gambling is “a vast social disease” that has a damaging impact on people’s lives and is a denial of faith in God.
A statement issued by Roscrea-based the Rev Brian D Griffin, the District Superintendent of the Midlands and Southern District of the Methodist Church of Ireland, said gambling lowers the tone of a nation.
“It is a form of the love of money which the Bible defines as the root of all evil,” said the church.
Much is being made of the jobs that will be created by the casino and the regional boost it will provide. But evidence from the US and Australia suggested while such enterprises boom, the impact on existing businesses and infrastructure is less positive, the church said in its statement.
“One researcher called a casino ‘a black hole sucking money out of a local economy’,” the church said.
According to the church gambling has:
* A damaging impact on people’s lives, jobs, relationships and families. It becomes an addiction. Problem gamblers are more likely to divorce, drink excessively, abuse wives and children and attempt suicide.
* Children of problem gamblers are more likely to do poorly at school, use drugs, run away, attempt suicide or become gamblers themselves.
* The gains of the winners are made at the expense of the losers. Gambling enables people to gain money without rendering any real service to society and without the investment of any personal skill.
* When gambling becomes the social norm, children are indirectly taught to believe in the importance of random chance and fate and thereby lose the belief in useful values of diligence, industriousness, studiousness and deferred gratification. Work, discipline and service are the real ways to independence and fulfilment, not dumb luck.
* Problem gamblers are more likely to miss, or be late for work. Their preoccupation with mounting debts results in lack of concentration which affects their productivity, ultimately rendering them less effective.
* Studies like The Social Implications of Casino Gambling(Brown and Fisher) show that with the increased availability of gambling facilities crime rises, both organised crime within casinos and crime as a consequence of the need to feed and fund the habit.
The statement said that the Department of Social Development in Northern Ireland had recognised that one in 50 of the population there has a gambling problem.
“Inevitably, the north Tipperary casino will produce some winners but a lot more losers with disastrous consequences for their families.”
The statement comes just over a week after news emerged that the Thurles-born developer Richard Quirke had been given the green light by An Bord Pleanála to build a casino as part of a €460 million sports and leisure facility at Two-Mile-Borris.