Irish Gambling Amendment Bill is making progress
We’re all excited to see the Gambling Amendment Bill to go through parliamentary commissions. During the last week, there’s been a lot of action and controversies that surrounded the legal process. Here’s what you have to know.
The independent gambling regulator
It’s been discussed a lot, and now we can announce it officially. The officials have finally decided that the country is going to form an independent governmental body to regulate the gambling sector.
It’s one of the best possible practices to handle the situation, as the UK shows. In our neighbouring country, there’s a similar governing body, the UK Gambling Commission. It has been performing incredibly well this year.
Earlier in 2019, UKGC has shown what it really means to have your hand on the pulse of the industry. The commission issued a ban on all ads that could inadvertently target minors. This means that no website or influencer that have over 25% of minors following them could advertise gambling-related websites.
But controlling the web is harder to say than to do. The UKGC handled that perfectly. Its researchers have been browsing the web to manually find ads that broke the policy and remove them.
That resulted in amazing numbers of fines paid by the industry actors and ads being removed before children could see them.
The Irish gambling authority will perform a similar role. It’s going to be funded by the Gross Gambling revenue tax and it will provide safety for gamblers and fair rules for the industry.
The maximum bet is going up
While most people took the previous news positively, this one spurred a controversy.
The committees are seriously discussing making the maximum bet at gambling venues a lot bigger. As you must know, the maximum bet at gambling establishments is minuscule. It’s only 50 cents. The new law may set it as high as €10. That’s over 20 times more than now. The legislators offer to increase the maximum payout to €750.
If the legislation passes with these corrections, it’s a huge win for all Irish gamblers. Now, we’ll be able to bet big and win big.
Despite seemingly good disposition for the gamblers, some lawmakers are opposed to this proposition. They argue that it’s going to increase the number of problem gamblers in the country. It’s already big with such a small maximum bet, and it’s going to increase with the bet dramatically.
This position is misinformed, as problem gamblers don’t grow an addiction because of how big is the bet. They develop a bad habit because they have problems they don’t want to acknowledge, and just want to forget about them while gambling.
The legal battle is not finished on this issue, but we have a chance of having it better than the British with their maximum £2 bet at fixed-odds betting terminals. Subscribe to our newsletter to learn will the Irish bettors have that much of a maximum bet and get to know other news on the subject of betting in Ireland.