Gambling is probably the toughest addiction of them all – and yet it remains virtually unregulated – Independent.ie

Whenever they start talking about the 'housing issue', I start thinking about the 'gambling issue'.

ousing is difficult, with many vested interests and conflicting opinions to negotiate before you start shelling out the money in vast quantities.

There is even an ideological problem, whereby governments in this country (and most other countries) are pathologically opposed to doing anything that they believe can be done more efficiently by our old friends, the "private sector".

Indeed this belief persists, even when it has been clearly shown that these things can't be done more efficiently by the private sector - and in some cases they can't be done at all.

With all these issues in play, and when you throw in the natural torpor of an institutional culture, the last Government hardly even noticed the tremendous anger that had been building for a long time.

They seemed frozen, putting out these graphs and numbers and projections about the greatness of the economy in general, seemingly oblivious to the better kind of evidence which has been emerging - such as the fact that so many people are finding themselves broke before the end of the month.

This sense of creeping inertia is partly just a function of the way things are done, and the inability of those on large six-figure salaries to imagine what life is like for those less fortunate than themselves - which is almost everyone.

And yes, housing is difficult, and would be difficult even if everyone was doing the right thing and thinking the right way all the time.

With all these other obstacles, it can take an insanely long time to get something done that is in the public interest, and not actually against it - such a long time, that inertia ceases to be a mere malfunction, and becomes a policy.

So when they talk of housing, I think of gambling, which had a bill drafted in 2013, under the then minister Alan Shatter - a man whose lawyerly skills have never been in doubt, a man who was not in the habit of sending bills out into the world in an unfit state, and certainly not to the extent that it would take at least seven years (and counting) for them to be enacted.

No, there wasn't much wrong with that bill at the time, and there still isn't much wrong with it - so you'd think that was a good start. And yet seven years later - considerably longer than World War II - several parties were able to declare in manifestos that they'd be treating the introduction of gambling legislation as a matter of urgency, because whatever attitudes the last Government had to it, urgency was not among them.

Yes there will be a regulator, perhaps before the end of this year. But there has been a regulator in Britain for some time now, dishing out enormous fines to betting corporations for stuff that their Irish branches could be doing all day long, without hindrance - taking money from punters for example, that turns out to be stolen, without performing adequate checks on where it came from.

And meanwhile, the bankruptcies and the break-ups and the jail sentences and the suicides will continue, as they have done for the past seven years and beyond, while legislation in this area has been sitting there as if there was nothing to get excited about - like this was just some esoteric issue pertaining to the preservation of certain forms of wildlife, the sort of thing that would never demand your immediate attention.

Not that attention wasn't being paid to it, in another sense. If there is lobbying on behalf of powerful interests in the area of housing, you may be sure that with gambling legislation the corporate bookies have not been slow out of the traps either, with their fine presentations.

Despite the jolly facades, they are ruthless people - and not just in their ceaseless quest to acquire all the territory they can before the marshal (as it were) arrives in Dodge City.

In Britain, there has been a facility whereby bookies can make a voluntary contribution to a "social fund" for the treatment of problem gamblers, to which one bookmaker contributed the sum of 50 - yes, that's fifty pounds sterling.

In Ireland's proposed legislation the "social fund" should be mandatory, and perhaps this will happen under the benign stewardship of the kind which Fianna Fail or Sinn Fein or Labour are promising. But dear God, it has taken such a very long time already. And like the housing problem, gambling has many crazy stories. For example it is not uncommon now for drug dealers to be paid not in cash on street corners, but by addicts going into betting offices where they can lodge money to the dealer's online account.

But none of this was considered urgent enough during the past seven years to push the legislation through - "push" in this case being a somewhat relaxed form of pushing.

And you wanted them to build a load of houses, right now?

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Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar

REUTERS

I get that Bernie Sanders is a Commie and all that, and that Joe Sixpack will never vote for a Commie - but I would not agree with all these "responsible" pundits who warn that Bernie going up against Trump is as unelectable as Jeremy Corbyn.

Though they are both Commies, Bernie is a very different kind of man to Corbs, who for all his socialist zeal, is actually quite posh - he and his equally posh chums at the top of the Labour Party who have exposed the British working class to the catastrophe of Brexit, are never really angry about anything. They try so hard, but it's just not in them.

Bernie's rage is real, and people can identify with that. Indeed, they probably can't remember the last time anyone stood in front of them asking for a vote, who had anything real about them.

So Bernie has a chance there, and when they call him a Commie he can say that Trump is a Commie too, except he only believes in socialism for billionaires.

But the main reason I distrust much of this Anyone But Bernie commentary, is that it tends to come with a recommendation that Joe Biden is the reasonable alternative. That Joe is electable.

My friends, Joe is not electable. Not on this planet anyway, to which it seems he is an increasingly infrequent visitor.

Indeed there is something quite troubling going on here, with pundits still pretending that Joe is on his game, while the results of the primaries deliver a very different diagnosis.

But Joe is showing us something - in time his candidacy may be held up as an illustration of how difficult it can be, for a man and his family and friends to face the sadness of his decline.

Jimmy Greaves, who was 80 last week, was a phenomenal footballer and unusual in that he didn't really like football that much - he said he had "an interest" in it, rather than a passion, though he loved playing it.

And it was perhaps this detachment from the game that made him such a great goalscorer, enabling him to get over the disappointments of the missed chances because he wasn't all that disappointed anyway.

John Giles revered him, recalling how he would see Greaves for Spurs bearing down on the Leeds goal and know for sure that Greaves was going to score - he had that striker's gift of making the goal seem a mile wide.

But he was also brilliant in speaking about his alcoholism, insisting it wasn't just a result of his being injured when England won the World Cup.

He spoke about it at a time when public figures, especially sportsmen, were not so forthcoming about their addictions.

He made that - and staying sober - look easy too.

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Gambling is probably the toughest addiction of them all - and yet it remains virtually unregulated - Independent.ie