“I had a call this morning from a gent – he just rang me out of the blue – and he was so, so angry,” says Sharon Byrne, chairperson of the Irish Bookmakers Association.
“He does his daughters’ birthdays in our shops and thinks it is very unfair he’ll never be able to do that again. Just a random caller.”
She is referring to a practice that angers the National Lottery.
Bookmakers allow people to bet that two or three particular numbers will come up in the national draw. According to Byrne, many people place this type of bet regularly: selecting numbers that have a personal significance to them. Children’s birthdays and the date of wedding anniversaries are favourites.
She says the odds offered – typically 33/1 on two out of seven numbers being drawn – give punters a much better chance of a return than the actual lottery does.
[ Lotto operator seeks ban on bookmakers taking bets on draws amid claims of €289m sales losses ]
This week the operators of the National Lottery came out swinging at the practice.
They argue that it is depriving good causes of €81 million in potential revenue and have called for it to be banned. They point out that the practice is not permitted in 25 out of 27 European Union member states.
“I know they [National Lottery] say, ‘We give it to good causes and you guys [bookmakers] don’t’,” Byrne says.
“But their business model is very different – they have a pot of money that is guaranteed. A bookmaker is very different; a bookmaker could actually lose money.”
After calling for a ban on such betting in bookmakers this week, the National Lottery operator finds itself under scrutiny again.
At the same time as going to war with Ireland’s gambling industry over betting on its Lotto, it is facing calls for the main draw to be moved beyond the 9pm watershed.
The lottery exists in a strange place.
It is marketed as a joyful, harmless punt that benefits good causes. Yet its critics say it is helping to normalise gambling among children – and question the proportion of the proceeds making their way to charities and community groups.
“It’s amazing the number of people who have said to us they were never comfortable with how the family movie was stopped on a Saturday night to show the lottery draw,” says researcher Frank Houghton, the principal investigator at the tobacco, alcohol and gambling research group at Technological University of the Shannon.
“What the National Lottery does quite excellently is it manages to portray a fantastically sanitised and philanthropic image of what – at the end of the day – is gambling.
“It serves to normalise gambling. Its advertising is ubiquitous. My concern is always around the impact of such exposure on children. We know we have an underage gambling problem in Ireland – and yet this isn’t being addressed.”
Where does every euro spent on the lottery go?
- 57 cent – prizes
- 28 cent – “good causes”
- 10 cent – costs and profit
- 5 cent – retailers
Four per cent of prizes go unclaimed and this money is put towards marketing
Source: €1 spend on National Lottery or Lotto Product (2024) – National Lottery
Houghton argues it is “bizarre” that the lottery has been exempted from the new Gambling Regulation Act. This, he says, means it will be able to advertise extensively and position its products prominently, while the likes of Paddy Power and other bookmakers will be significantly constrained.
A key plank of the National Lottery’s argument that it should be treated differently from mainstream gambling businesses relates to the contributions it makes to “good causes”. In 2024, 28 per cent of the money spent on tickets and scratch cards ended up here.
The National Lottery is run by Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI), which was awarded the 20-year contract in 2014. Three years ago, PLI was sold to La Française des Jeux (FDJ), France’s lottery operator and one of Europe’s biggest gambling businesses.
PLI says that since it was established in 1987, the lottery has generated almost €7 billion for causes across the State and says about 4,500 organisations are beneficiaries.
This money is not allocated by the company. Instead it is transferred from the National Lottery Fund to the Central Exchequer. Government departments then sift through applications for funding and “disperse grants accordingly”.
Sports, arts, heritage, youth, health, community and Irish language are the categories under which applicants can apply.
Recipients cited by the Lottery range from drug and alcohol treatment centres to organisations that rescue and rehabilitate bats.
So how is the money generated by lottery ticket sales divided up?
The legislation underpinning the contract dictates that the total value of prizes across the portfolio of National Lottery games should be at least 50 per cent of the income generated in a given financial year. Once the prizes are accounted for, then 65 per cent of the remaining ticket income should go towards good causes.
The exact amount that goes towards prizes can vary from year to year and can be significantly higher than the 50 per cent threshold.
In 2024, the total paid out in prize money was 56.99 per cent of total sales. The year before had been slightly higher at 57.7 per cent of sales.
The business sells lots of tickets. According to its latest accounts for 2024, total sales of draw tickets, scratch cards and instant games came to almost €856 million.
From that, around €488 million was paid out on prizes and €239 million went to good causes. Retailers were said to have received €44 million in commissions, while the company says around 10 per cent of total sales cover its operating costs, expenses and profit.
The company reported an operating loss for the year of €5.9 million.
At the same time, a €20 million dividend payment was made to its immediate parent company – FDJ International Lotteries – with a proposed further €10 million to be paid in 2025.
According to the accounts, the loss attributable to shareholders’ payments the previous year was double this, standing at €40 million. In 2022 it accounted for €22 million.
The French parent company is a big operation and was previously owned by the French state. In 2024, FDJ reported group revenue in excess of €3.7 billion and a net profit of almost €500 million.
“The unclaimed prizes is my pet hate,” says Byrne from the bookmakers association.
The lotto company is allowed, after 90 days, to put this money towards the promotion of the National Lottery within the following 365 days.
The last time the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) looked at this issue it found that between 2015 and 2021 just over €124 million in “forfeited” prizes had been availed of by the operator – roughly €18 million a year.
The C&AG recommended that annual numbers be made available.
“They get to keep almost €20 million a year and pump it into advertising,” Byrne says. “Perhaps it could be made better use of. They get to decide what they do with it.”
A PLI spokesperson said it could not reveal how much it spent on marketing as it was “commercially sensitive”, but that typically 4 per cent of prizes would go unclaimed every year.
The battle between the traditional bookmakers market and PLI has been going on for several years.
In late 2019, a report commissioned by the European Lotto Betting Association (ELBA) said the commercial strategy being pursued by PLI was costing up to €43 million a year in lost revenues for good causes.
Written by economist Tony Foley of Dublin City University, the report said a large part of this was due to the “unprecedented” level of unclaimed prizes returned to the operator. He argued then that the threat of online lottery betting to good causes funding was “minimal”.
PLI responded by pointing out that the ELBA members did not make any contributions to good-cause funding and some continued betting activities on the Irish lottery which were prohibited in other European countries.
It also argued that the amount of good-cause funding raised in 2018 was €49 million higher than in 2014.
This renewed bout of verbal jousting all comes as the new gambling regulator has started to go about its work.
The Gambling Regulatory Authority is due to start issuing licences for remote betting in July. The retail sector follows later in the year.
Byrne says the bookmaker industry is shrinking.
“Our sector is shrinking rapidly while theirs [the National Lottery] is growing,” she says. “Their turnover is not dropping and they say we are cannibalising their market. It’s a baseless claim.”