Consultant Psychiatrist Professor Colin O’Gara, Head of Addiction Services at St John of God Hospital, appeared on a segment for RTÉ’s Prime Time on 18 March to provide expert knowledge on gambling addiction, including how its prevalence has increased in recent years.
Watch the segment in full on the RTÉ website here (beginning at 20:28), and read quotes from Prof O’Gara below:
The online product has made what is essentially a highly addictive process available to the masses, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Previous estimates of gambling addiction, if you looked at old British prevalence surveys going back 15, 20 years, it was somewhere around 0.3 to 0.8 per cent of the population, a figure that the industry were very keen to put out. What we have now, according to the ESRI figures, Pete Lunn and his colleagues, we have that in Ireland, people are severely affected at 3 per cent. And that’s just the headline figure of people who are extremely affected. We know that up to 15 per cent of people are moderately affected. The online piece has caused huge difficulties, but really when you’re defining what a gambling product is, it is all addictive, it is all a gambling product, including the national lottery.
Regarding levies on the gambling industry who breach the new legislation, which will be put toward services for those suffering from gambling addiction:
What is a social fund going to look like in terms of the funding? What levy is going to be put on the gambling industry in terms of funding services? At present in this country, if you suffer from gambling addiction, the likelihood is, […] you are not going to attend for treatment. 1 in probably 8 or 9 people actually present for treatment. The rest of the people suffer in silence out there.