Politicians leave themselves open when they take bookmakers’ hospitality

As ever, it’s the rank smallness of it all that makes the Pols Go To Punchestown story such a dreary affair.

A Thursday table in one of the corporate hospitality tents at last month’s festival went for an average of €230 a head. That’s steep enough for most people to be spending on a day out, right enough. But for politicians on salaries ranging from €70,000 to over €100,000, it’s no biggie. If any of them wanted to go to Punchestown, they didn’t need the Irish Bookmakers’ Association to bring them.

But that isn’t the point, of course. None of them went because it was their only way of getting through the gate. They went because the representative body of the bookmaking industry wanted them there. The IBA bought three tables in a hospitality tent and used them to feed and water our politicians.

The TDs and senators knew it was a bad idea. They knew they were colouring outside the lines of what they should be doing. The way you know they knew is that one of them – former Fine Gael chief whip Paul Kehoe – told Craig Hughes of the Mail that: “I’m not squealing on anybody else who was there”, when he was asked about his attendance. If you’re at an event you feel there’s no issue with, squealing doesn’t come into it.

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And the issue is obvious enough. There is never a bad time for the bookmaking industry to do nice things for the politicians who make the laws that govern their business. But of all the not bad times, the final stages of the long-awaiting Gambling Regulation Bill would appear to be particularly far from terrible.

The laws underpinning gambling in Ireland are hopelessly out of date. Everyone knows this and all sides accept it. The UK has had a gambling regulator since 2007, three years before Paddy Power launched the first smartphone betting app and fundamentally changed gambling forever. But despite being home to one of the drivers of the online gambling revolution and the world’s largest betting company, Ireland still doesn’t have a regulator fully 15 years after the UK set up theirs.

One of the aims of the bill is to have a gambling regulator in place by 2023. Nobody knows exactly what it will all look like in the end but everyone in the gambling industry knows there is a reckoning of sorts coming. Which is why any and all interactions they have with politicians right around now are of interest to the general public.

Readers will remember the committee stage back in February when Martin Le Jeune, the rep for multinational betting conglomerate Entain, began by telling the Oireachtas that his firm welcomes regulation and how they are on the same page as the legislators when it comes to safer gambling. And how he also went on to contend with a straight face that there was “no inherent difference between online gambling and retail gambling”.

This is the push and pull the bookmaking industry has to involve itself in here. They are entirely right to advocate for themselves, of course. It is important that they are seen to be broadly supportive of regulation, lest they be cast as pariahs in a society that is finally waking up to the dangers of gambling addiction. It is in their interests, therefore, to do all they can to inform and shape the powers that will be built into the new law.

There are official channels to do just that. Committee meetings, stakeholder submissions, meetings with TDs and senators that are recorded under lobbying regulations, minuted and available to all under Freedom of Information legislation. All of this is out there in the ether for people to find if they’re of a mind to go looking.

The hosting of lawmakers in a VIP tent at the Punchestown races by the association that represents 95 per cent of bookmakers in the State is not something that is officially recorded anywhere. It doesn’t fall under the catchment of lobbying legislation and they don’t have to declare it as a gift. It’s just seen as a harmless day out, not worth making a fuss over.

We are told that no lobbying took place at the event. Makes sense, in a way. How would that even look, after all? Does somebody from the IBA go around table to table, pressing the flesh like a bride’s dad at a wedding? “Great to see ye lads and lassies. Wine good? Beef tender? Betting companies’ liabilities to the dependents and creditors of problem gamblers go bye-bye?”

But that isn’t the point. The point is they shouldn’t have been there on the IBA’s dime. The most benign view of their attendance is that they should know better than to be putting themselves in a situation that only encourages the cynicism that drives public life these days. There are, as you might imagine, any amount of less kind takes available too.

Politicians get invited to dinners and days out all the time. Contrary to what some of the darker corners of the internet will tell you, they’re generally neither stupid nor malign. They know their presence at any event says something. It is up to them to dictate what that something is. The best way to remove suspicion is not to go. The second best is to pay your own way. Choose the third way and you leave yourself open.

“We were not lobbied,” one of those present told The Irish Times last week in high dudgeon. “Next they will be telling TDs and Ministers they can’t accept tickets to the All-Ireland final because the GAA lobbies the Government from time to time.”

We can only hope.