Time to tame a monster we didn't gamble on

IT was comforting to learn this week from the developers of the proposed casino at the Phoenix Park that the spoor would not be allowed to its doors. Staff on the doors, we were told, would be able to "detect people who can afford to gamble and those who can't."

The detection, apparently, will be by means dress code. The great thing about the poor, of course, is that they all look alike. Cloth caps are a dead giveaway, and the headscarf over the curlers, the fag in the side of the mouth, and the top of the gin bottle peeping out of the pocket tell the trained doorman as much as Sherlock Holmes ever learned from a slightly frayed cuff or an inconspicuous acid burn on the little finger.

On the other hand, though, have you ever seen someone in an Armani suit desperately stuffing coins into a fruit machine? Is Las Vegas full of fashion victims in little off the shoulder Givenchy numbers? Were the respectably dressed housewives who used to stand before the one armed bandits in O'Connell Street, before they were banned, until their last pound was gone, figments of the imagination?

People who can afford to gamble on gaming machines like the "less than 500" one armed bandits proposed for the Phoenix Park, don't. Almost by definition, those who pour money into the machines can't afford to lose it. The gambling business makes its profits from despair and fantasy, and the poor have a higher than normal quota of both. If this were not the case, and all the gamblers were to be smooth Roger Moore types, then the casino could stick to roulette and leave the one armed bandits alone.

AT LEAST, though, the casino promoters feel they ought to be seen to discourage gambling by the poor. The State has no such feelings, or if it does, it is remarkably quiet about them. While the casino proposals have, rightly, attracted strong criticism from politicians of all parties, all of the same parties have continued to make full use of a form of gambling that is not only institutionalised but that appeals disproportionately to the poorest section of Irish society.

I mean, of course, the National Lottery. Every study that has been done over the last nine years has confirmed that poor people buy more lottery tickets than anyone else. Since 1987, when it went into operation, the lottery has replaced the church as the great mediator between mundane realities and celestial aspirations in Ireland. When parish priests introduced bingo to the towns and villages of Ireland all those years ago, they can hardly have thought that they were encouraging a rival that would prove, in the long run, more potent than either sex or rock n roll. People who used to pray to St Anthony or St Jude for a windfall now buy scratch cards instead. "God is good" has been replaced, in the mantras of desire, by "my numbers might come up".

The lottery has become such a powerful force in the nation's imagination, indeed, that we forget bow grossly excessive it is, and how far it has departed from its original intentions. Nobody ever sat down and drew up plans for the lottery we now have. The original government calculation of the amount of money it would raise was the greatest underestimate since the citizens of Europe were told in 1914 that the war would be over by Christmas.

The figure cited in the Dail by Ted Nealon, on behalf of the then coalition government in 1986 was £27 million a year. This, to be precise, underestimated the amount actually spent on lottery tickets by 1,079 per cent. In 1995, the lottery raised £265.4 million, nearly 10 times the original estimate. It is as if we took a cuddly little kitten into the house only for it to grow up to be a tiger, yet we keep feeding it.

And not only is the scale of the lottery vastly different to what was envisaged, but so also its purpose. It was meant to provide the State with an opportunity to spend money on things that it couldn't otherwise afford, originally sport and culture, then also good works in the community. In 1986, Ted Nealon told the Dail: "I can assure the House that there is no intention to use lottery funds for general government purposes." The National Lottery Act specifies that the money is to be spent on "sport and recreation, national culture, including the Irish language, the arts and the health of the community and for such other purposes as the government may determine from time to time". But Ted Nealon told the Seanad that there was "no question" that this last clause would be used "for the purposes of hijacking proceeds from the lottery into general government expenditure.

BERTIE Ahern, when he was Minister for Finance in 1994, repeated the view that "National Lottery money should not be used to replace Exchequer money." Yet this is exactly what has happened under every government since 1986. The lottery is used as a kind of voluntary tax, for the funding of ordinary government spending. About 63 per cent of the lottery funds that are disbursed goes to state, semi state or statutory bodies.

Brian Harvey, in an excellent report on the lottery published last year by the Policy Research Centre of the College of Industrial Relations, estimated that at most 10 per cent of lottery money - amounting last year to just £6.3 million - actually went to fund things that were not funded before it started to operate.

And it is virtually impossible to discover how some of the lottery money used to fund ordinary public services is actually spent. No one Minister is answerable for the allocation of lottery funds as a whole. Significant amounts of lottery money go to health boards without any requirement for subsequent information about how it has been spent. In some respects the lottery's millennium clock under O'Connell Bridge is an apt symbol - big numbers sunk beneath the daily flow and not always possible to see very clearly.

It is time to tame the lottery monster by recognising that it makes no sense whatsoever to run parts of a state on the cruel illusion that the person in the ads could be you. Michael Woods's private members Bill, which would have the effect of allowing voluntary groups like Rehab to compete with the National Lottery on fair terms, is a good start to a process of questioning and deserves support.

But more needs to be done capping the size of individual prizes and reducing the amount of advertising, for instance - and the review of the lottery that was promised by the present Government when it took up office is long overdue. If it is sleazy for private developers to fund their grandiose schemes with the proceeds from one armed bandits, why is it all right for a sovereign state to fund some of its services with scratch cards? Public services should run on hope and justice, not on fantasy and despair.