There is, of course, something vaguely obscene about tonight's Lotto jackpot now expected to surge past a record £7 million when there are so many deserving cases all around us. In every town and village in this State there are literally hundreds of voluntary and charitable groups who desperately require just a fraction of that sum to sustain their facilities.
To complete the absurdity, the final scale of the jackpot, which has now been rolled over twice weekly since, early last month, probably matters little at this stage, to any winner; he or she is already certain to be a millionaire many times over, come what may.
And yet the Government is probably right not to impose a ceiling on the Lotto jackpot. The National Lottery clearly needs such occasional multi million pound jackpots to generate publicity and to maintain public interest. A huge jackpot figure, like that on offer tonight, brings a sense of glamour and razmatazz to the lotto draw. By contrast, a lotto jackpot with a ceiling of say £1 million would look positively routine - with an inevitable fall off in the numbers participating and in the amount of funds available for good causes.
The discussion about a proposed jackpot ceiling is also an unwelcome diversion from the substantive, issue the highly questionable manner in which, National Lottery funds are dispersed by government.
Eight years after its launch, the lottery has failed to deliver on its promise to make a tangible difference in areas like sports and recreation, arts and culture, although last night's announcement that the Government is to donate £1 million of lottery funds for humanitarian relief in Central Africa, is to be welcomed. The kind of arts and sporting infrastructure that citizens of every other EU state take for granted, has still to be put in place; indeed, the lamentable failure to provide a 50 metre swimming pool tells its own story.
The kernel of the problem lies in the section of the 1986 legislation which allows that lottery money can be used for "such (if any) other purposes, and in such, amounts, as the Government may determine from time to time". In practice, this means that government ministers and Departments can enjoy full discretion about funding in their areas of responsibility. As a result, a huge proportion of lottery funds are now used effectively as another form of taxation to fund State services or as a kind of political slush fund to curry political favour in the constituencies, with politicians happy to announce that they have "secured" lottery funding for some worthy cause.
An independent survey earlier this year found that, far from funding entirely new programmes, some 90 per cent of current lottery money has simply replaced programmes which the government already funded in 1986.
The Government recently announced an independent review of the lottery which will examine its strategic objectives and the procedures for distributing and allocating its resources. The hope must be that this will lead to substantial reforms, although on past evidence, it can be expected that government will jealously guard the discretion it now enjoys on the allocation of funds. The main objective of any reforms should be twofold; to produce a funding system that is transparent and fully accountable and to ensure that funds are channelled to the good causes which so badly need them. The British model in which certain " good causes" like the Arts Council, the National Heritage Trust and the Sports Council are free to disburse its allocation as they see fit, may be worth examining.