When Oisín McConville first went public with his gambling addiction, the world was a different place. The betting world, especially.
It was September 2007 – Paddy Power wouldn’t release its mobile app for another three years. There were nearly 1,400 betting shops in Ireland at the time – the number now is around half that. Gambling was still essentially illegal in all but two states in the US; these days you can bet in 39 of the 50, with more inexorably on the way.
So much has changed in 17 years. And yet so much is still the same as ever. Ireland’s gambling industry is still without a regulator. The legislation underpinning gambling in the Republic is still awaiting its overhaul – statutes from as far back as 1929, 1931 and 1956 are still on the books. James Browne TD aims to have the final stage of the Gambling Regulation Bill 2022 in front of the Dáil next month. Precisely nobody is holding their breath.
Because of McConville’s high profile in this area, he regularly gets hauled on to radio shows and so on to provide a voice from the arena. Isn’t it a disgrace, he is asked/nudged, that it is all taking this long? And it is, he agrees. But it’s not nothing. And nothing, for so, so long, has been the accepted norm.
“They will be going to me, ‘This Gambling Bill, it doesn’t go far enough, does it?’” he says. “And I’m thinking, ‘No, it doesn’t. But hold on a second. This is a start.’ Let’s crawl before we can run. We’ve been waiting so long on it. And there’s no doubt about it, in 12 months’ time after it comes in, I’ll be banging a drum for more. But we have to start somewhere. We’re going from zero.”
[ From the archive: McConville reveals scale of gambling addictionOpens in new window ]
Just this week, Browne was in front of the Seanad, fielding questions from various senators on amendments to the Bill. It is grinding, painstaking work, as anyone who tuned in could see. McConville sees a lot of good in what is proposed to be in the Bill so far and knows there is a fair amount of low-hanging fruit that will do plenty of good if enacted.
“One of the big things will be to enforce the age of 18 as the legal age,” he says. “I went to a school in Killarney last year – kids at 17, 18 years of age. I said, ‘Hands up who’s been in the bookies before?’ And two people put up their hands. So I said, ‘How many people have had a bet before?’ And literally all but five or 10 people put up their hands.
“So you have to change tack with it. The majority of the people I meet started gambling at 14, 15, 16 years of age. So by the time they’re 18, it’s already a normal part of their life. That does huge damage.
“Because if you begin at 14 and what are you losing? Your pocket money, basically. No big deal. Except that then you go on to having a part-time job and your first earnings. And now, if you’re gambling, it forms a lot of your thoughts around what you want to do and what you want to be.
“What did I want to be? I didn’t give a f**k as long as there was 300 or 400 quid waiting for me at the end of the week so I could go gambling. I’m not saying that I could have been a surgeon. I was very poor academically. But I still would have had a chance to go to college and have some sort of career. But I didn’t. Because my train of thought, stupid as it sounds, was, ‘I can make a living out of this’. Gambling was so ingrained in me by that age.”
The distance from there to here. Gambling is still a constant theme in McConville’s life – it’s just that now, he’s a beacon in the storm for so many, as opposed to the shipwreck he was back then. As maybe the best-known recovering gambler in Ireland, he has found himself as the go-to for countless families and loved ones who have someone in need of help.
The thing about gambling is it’s always crisis point by the time you get involved. Nobody ever comes when they’re halfway down the track. They come to you when everything is gone
— Oisín McConville
It started very quickly after his book The Gambler came out. His phone started buzzing with stories of young men in trouble. Mostly young GAA men, initially. Would he mind having a chat with them? Did he think there’d be anything that could be done? He always said yes, partly because it’s in his nature and partly because this was why he went public in the first place.
“I think the big thing for me was the reason why I felt as if I had to give something back. I felt that I wanted people to have what I had. I was in Gamblers Anonymous one time early on and a boy said to me, ‘You’re so lucky being here. Great things will happen to you when you’re in here.’
“And I was thinking, ‘You have no idea the s**t that I’m in here. I am in f**king down and out financially, emotionally, every way.’ But two or three years into it, I felt things were coming together. And then I wanted people to have what I had.
[ Incoming gambling laws prompt concerns for boost to black market bettingOpens in new window ]
“I suppose I was aware that [the book] was going to cause a reaction. I felt it was going to have a fairly positive effect on a lot of people who were struggling. But I didn’t realise the amount of people who were going to come directly to me. That was tricky. And as soon as I realised that, I realised I was going to have to further myself in that department.”
He went and did a counselling diploma and found out the best thing he could have found out – namely, that he isn’t a counsellor. Instead, he found that his strengths are more suited to intervention. He is good at being the person who is there when someone has nowhere else to turn, the initial contact who gets in, starts the real talk and then passes them on to someone who will help.
“The thing about gambling is it’s always crisis point by the time you get involved. They come to you at their crisis point. Nobody ever comes when they’re halfway down the track. They come to you when everything is gone. I did the same. I had exhausted every avenue to get money.
“That’s when I held my hands up. It’s not like I’m going around preaching to people, saying I came to my senses, I saw this flash and found my way out. It wasn’t that. It was because there was no other avenue to get money. I was absolutely f**ked. So I know how they’re feeling when they get to the point that they’re talking to me.
“But one of the pieces of advice I got, and it sticks with me to this day, is that if I’m working harder than the other person, then I have to leave it alone. Because I have to still take care of my own stuff, you know what I mean? My own stuff and self-care and all that.
“That was the best advice. That was a boy from Kerry who gave me that. Because I’d be chasing people, trying to get them to cop on. It has to come from them. I knew that I wanted to save everybody and it’s just not possible.”
So he minds himself. He still goes to GA meetings, he still checks himself to see if anything is bubbling up. At home, he and his wife Darina are good at talking things out, at keeping things open and honest. “It’s good to have that because some days can be heavy,” he says. “You meet people who are in serious s**t, they’re telling you things about their life that are horrendous.”
And more of it than ever. Of all the things that have changed in the past 17 years, accessibility to gambling outruns everything. Everyone has a bookie in their pocket. Every sporting event is polluted with advertising. There are more lottery games than ever, more scratch cards than you can count. When he goes to a GA meeting now, he meets everyone from 18-year-old boys to 40-year-old women to 80-year-old men.
That’s why he has got involved with the GamblingCare.ie charity. Set up in 2019 to fund research into and treatment of problem gambling, it has undoubtedly done plenty of good across the country. It’s funded a dedicated gambling wing in Cuan Mhuire in Athy and has another one coming in Galway in a few weeks. That’s a meaningful one for McConville – it’s where he went for his recovery all those years ago.
That said, as an institution GamblingCare isn’t without its question marks. It is funded by donations from the gambling companies and, as such, is open to accusations of reputation washing. McConville isn’t blind to that – in fact, he brings it up before The Irish Times does.
“The gambling industry funds it,” he says. “That’s what it is. Obviously when they asked me to get involved, I did my bit of digging before I said yes. That funding model will change over time.
[ Fear of gambling relapse ‘just terrifies’ Offaly’s Niall McNameeOpens in new window ]
“But for now, where are the other options? That’s my way of looking at it. This is a charity that is doing vital work and it’s not like there are loads of institutions coming to it going, ‘Here’s a load of funding so you can do more’. Give me another option. There are no other options. We have to get the regulator up and running first.”
That’s coming soon, all going well. McConville will be delighted when it does but he’ll keep plugging on regardless. Taking calls, helping people, being there.
When the Offaly footballer Niall McNamee went public with his own gambling story in 2014, McConville joked with him that at least there was another body now, someone else to share the load. More have come forward since – when GamblingCare put out their ad with McConville, Conn Kilpatrick and Richie Power during the championship, calls to their hotline increased by 43 per cent.
The road never ends.
If anyone is affected by what they’ve read, please contact gamblingcare.ie
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