Will politicians and media ever see gambling as a scourge? Don’t bet on it – Independent.ie

By coincidence, they were showing the BBC documentary about the gambling addiction of football man Paul Merson around the same time RT1 was showing a fine film by Ross Whitaker about the celebrated gambler and philanthropist Barney Curley.

Claire Byrne Liverecently had Tyrone GAA star Conn Kilpatrick coming out about his gambling issues; President Higgins has addressed the scandal of ubiquitous betting ads; there was even talk last week on various radio shows about the intentions of the Government to install a gambling regulator, which they have been intending to do for a very, very long time, but still

You could get the impression all round that the long campaign to raise awareness of these matters has been quite successful, although not nearly as successful as the efforts of the betting firms to raise unawareness.

Yet there was another story last week that made you wonder if it has all been a waste of time.

It came from Punters, the new book by Aaron Rogan about the rise of the Paddy Power corporation, and it concerned the bookies arranging in 2012 with An Post to return 1.75m stolen by the then manager of the Gorey post office, Tony OReilly, to fund his gambling addiction.

Tony and I having written the book on this, Tony 10, I was naturally intrigued by this story, which was on the front of the Sunday Business Post and seemed destined to be covered intensively in the media in the days that followed.

But it was not to be there were mentions by Gavan Reilly on News-talk, and by Cormac hEadhra on RT1s Drivetime. But otherwise, it didnt seem to make much impression on the heavy hitters of the Irish media, which is kind of a scandal in itself.

Here, after all, were two major Irish organisations doing something on the quiet that would have been of far more benefit to the community at large if it had been done openly.

Imagine if the bookies had said something like: We are refunding the money because we really screwed up here.Indeed, instead of inviting Tony to VIP enclosures, our only engagement with him should have been to refer him for addiction treatment.

And imagine if An Post had said something like: Our systems failed here.We had no understanding of how much harm a gambling addiction can cause, and we will educate our workforce on these issues, using the money that has been returned to us.

That would have been good, wouldnt it? In fact, it would have been great.

Yet the deal they made with one another was done in secret, for reasons that, at first glance, would seem to be counter-intuitive.

After all, the bookies are obsessed with advertising themselves, especially with handing over large cheques to some lucky winner of an accumulator, or generally to show what jolly good fellows they are.

But there weredrawbackswith this 1.75m mainly the fact it had been stolen.

Among the drawbacks, for instance, was the fact that to be seen handing it back might set some sort of a precedent for returning stolen money.

Its just a wild guess, but you can understand why they might not be as enthusiastic about that one as they are about handing over a big cardboard cheque to some guy who won 25 grand for an investment of 25 cent.

That still leaves us wondering why An Post would facilitate all this, since its hardly the first major institution to be robbed by an employee.

A clue may be found in the odd turn of events in 2018 when Tony 10was nearing publication, and it was they and not the betting corporation who instructed their lawyers to write to us, demanding to see it, for reasons that could broadly be described as security.

They were concerned about the safety of their workers if the book were to reveal the inner workings of one of their busy branches. As if you would have the same inner workings after a robbery of 1.75m as you had before it.

We were satisfied the book would not place workers in danger, and we didnt show it to them.

The only danger we could see for An Postwas that they would be embarrassed again by their own security failures, although we didnt know at the time about this secret arrangement with Paddy Power, which itself might be construed embarrassing.

Theres also the vague chance that Tony might have received a jail sentence shorter than four years if it had been known the money was being returned. But that we will never know.

What we do know is that in politics and the media there are many who claim they understand Irelands gambling problem, but really they dont get it.

They can ignore an important story like this, because ultimately theyre still seeing gambling under the heading of Fun. Yes, even when the Fun stopped a long time ago.

To mark the 80th birthday of Paul Simon, my colleague Tommy Conlon put out a tweet that sent a blast through the cultural ecosystem, the reverberations of which may not fully be absorbed in our time.

I know its not a competition, but when both great artists have left their bodies of work behind, maybe future generations will say that Simon was greater than Dylan, he wrote, attaching the Simon masterpiece Hearts and Bonesas Exhibit A.

Its one of those statements that has rarely been made before, and yet once it is made it starts to make a surprising kind of sense.

The astonishing volume of high-class material put out by Dylanwould always tend to favour him in any contest of this kind.

But maybe its more the differences in style that have created this impression that Dylan must clearly be superior his voice is as penetrating as the voice of Simon is restrained.

Yet there is a similar grandeur to the arc of both careers. They had that genius for reinvention, or just for longevity, that took them through myriad genres, be it folk or country or Gospel or whatever, while still sounding completely themselves.

Dylan is credited with the most radical change of direction, when he drove the culture towards that loud electric racket scorned by the folkie ideologues. But arguably, with Graceland, Simon made an even more spectacular leap with his take on African music a take that, again, after a few minutes, sounded like a regular Paul Simon album.

Still, I have to say I was shocked recently to discover that for American Tune, possibly the best song written by either man, Simon had lifted said tune straight from O Sacred Head, Sore Woundedby JS Bach.

Then again, Liam Clancy would tell you about Dylan shamelessly taking some sad old folk song and making it better.

Oh, Tommy Conlon, how sharp are the horns of this dilemma I cant say straight out that future generations would be right to favourSimon but they wouldnt be wrong either.

Dominic Cummings has clarified that the Johnson government always intended to ditch the Northern Ireland Brexit deal, but it was still strange to hear Leo Varadkar warning that the UK doesnt necessarily keep its word.

Two years ago last week, the same Leo met Boris Johnson near Liverpool and effectively gave him the bit of paper that Borisneeded to get out of jail, which, for the incorrigible blackguard Boris, was the only meaningful aspect of their encounter indeed, to any intelligent observer, this was terribly obvious.

Our Government made a strategic decision to go with Boris, thinking the Brits might come out of all this quite well, actually. It was a calamitous misjudgment.

If you were still enabling Johnson in late 2019, its a bit rich now to be warning the world.

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Will politicians and media ever see gambling as a scourge? Don't bet on it - Independent.ie