Statement from the Board of Directors of the Gambling Awareness Trust
The Gambling Awareness Trust is acutely aware of the misperception around the nature of our funding, and we cannot reiterate strongly enough how we independently fund and support reputable, professional organisations in the areas of treatment and education to provide services that would otherwise be unavailable. We believe the current discourse questioning independence undermines the excellent supports available across the country and deflects from the important issues which could potentially impact our service users. It is our intention to continue to ensure anyone in Ireland affected by harmful gambling can receive the help they need when they need it.
Since our establishment, we have always supported the position that gambling addiction is a public health issue that requires a cohesive government led multi-agency response and we are wholly supportive of the funding of education, early intervention, awareness, and treatment services through the impending government levy on the industry. We fully agree that the ‘polluter-pays’ funding model is less than ideal when making provisions to adequately deal with an issue of public health and we look forward to the funding that will become available through the Social Impact Fund under incoming legislation.
In the absence of a state response, a national strategy on gambling or any significant service provision prior to our establishment, the need in our communities grew, year over year. Recent ESRI research informs us of 130,000 problem gamblers in Ireland with three quarters of a million people impacted by harmful gambling. In the past 3 years we have funded over 30,000 specialist counselling sessions and taken over 13,000 calls from people in crisis on our helpline. We have directly supported over 4,000 people during that time, both those experiencing problem gambling and gambling addiction and their affected families. The HSE refers people to our website who visit HSE.ie seeking help for harmful gambling.
Our strategic plan is research led and evidence based. The 2021 Maynooth report highlighted the need for specialist training for Addiction Practitioners in the field who felt inadequately skilled in providing support to those presenting with gambling addiction. We currently provide funding to two third level institutions, MTU and ICHAS to provide QQI Level 8 and 9 training and subsidise student places in an effort to improve the quality of service provision across the country. Over 100 therapists have completed this training to date. We are satisfied that the academic content of both courses meets the strict and stringent QQI criteria and trust their professional academic expertise in the design and delivery of the training. The Gambling Awareness Trust has never provided educational programmes in schools, nor do we have any plans to do so.
While the Gambling Awareness Trust receives our funding through the Social Responsibility Fund which consists of voluntary contributions from the online, retail and some other betting operators in Ireland, we are an independent national charity overseen by a voluntary board of directors. The work we do is not in any way influenced by the gambling industry. The industry has no operational or other involvement in how we conduct our business or allocate funding. Any or all of the agencies we provide funding to can testify to this. When this fund was created in 2018 to address the issue of problem gambling and gambling addiction in Irish society it was in the absence of the availability of any government funding. The board of directors of the Gambling Awareness Trust made a considered decision to accept the funding rather than to wait for funding to become available through the impending gambling legislation.
At our hugely successful conference in November last year Sr Agnes Fitzgerald, Co-founder of Cuan Mhuire, the largest provider of addiction treatment services in Ireland, stated that without GAT funding lives would be lost. Cuan Mhuire provides two bespoke gambling addiction residential treatment programmes, which prior to GAT did not exist anywhere in the country. Last year 220 individuals were treated for their gambling addiction through this programme.
