Why Does Irish Lottery Betting Cost Good Causes €81 Million?

Lottery betting in Ireland — where bookmakers offer fixed-odds bets on the outcome of National Lottery draws rather than selling actual lottery tickets — diverted an estimated €81 million from Good Causes funding in 2024, according to an Indecon International Economic and Strategic Consultants report published in late April 2026. Premier Lotteries Ireland (the FDJ United-owned operator of the National Lottery), backed by Charities Institute Ireland, has used the findings to call for a statutory ban on bookmaker draw-betting on Irish lottery games.

The report estimates total bookmaker turnover on Irish lottery draw-betting at €289.7 million in 2024. Because roughly 28% of every euro spent on actual National Lottery tickets is allocated to Good Causes, applying that ratio to the displaced €289.7m yields the €81m shortfall. The report also estimates an average annual loss of €63m across 2021–2024.

How Lottery Betting Works

Lottery betting is structurally different from buying a lottery ticket:

• A lottery ticket is a stake in the actual prize pool. A fixed share — in Ireland, about 30 cents per euro — is contractually allocated to Good Causes covering sport, youth, health, welfare, education, arts, heritage, and the Irish language.
• A bookmaker draw-bet is a fixed-odds wager on what numbers will be drawn. The bookmaker is the counterparty. No money enters the lottery prize pool, and no Good Causes contribution is made.

From the consumer's viewpoint, the products look interchangeable — the same numbers, the same draw, often a higher headline payout. From the public-funding viewpoint, they are not interchangeable at all.

Why Operators Should Care

The Irish dispute matters beyond Ireland because lottery betting sits at a regulatory fault line that several European jurisdictions are revisiting:

• The UK allowed lottery betting under the Gambling Act 2005, but Camelot (and now Allwyn) have repeatedly raised similar Good Causes concerns. The UK Gambling Commission has historically declined to ban the practice but has tightened advertising rules.
• Germany restricts bookmaker betting on state lottery draws under the State Treaty on Gambling.
• Spain and Portugal route lottery products through state monopolies, effectively blocking private bookmakers from offering equivalent draw-betting.
• Ireland's Gambling Regulation Act 2024 created the new Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland (GRAI) but did not directly resolve the lottery-betting question. The Indecon report is positioned as a lobbying instrument to force a legislative answer.

For operators, the practical question is whether lottery-derivative markets remain a viable product line in Western Europe. The trajectory points toward narrower availability, mandatory contributions to lottery beneficiary funds, or outright prohibition.

What the Report Argues

The Indecon analysis frames lottery betting as a free-rider problem rather than a competition issue. Premier Lotteries Ireland funds the brand awareness, draw infrastructure, retail distribution, and advertising that creates demand for the numbers. Bookmakers monetize that demand without contributing to the funding model that sustains it.

The report's three core claims:

1. Substitution, not addition. Lottery betting is not creating new gambling demand — it is converting buyers who would otherwise purchase lottery tickets into bookmaker customers.
2. Linear pass-through. Because the National Lottery's Good Causes contribution is fixed at ~28% of ticket sales, every euro of substitution maps directly to a Good Causes shortfall.
3. Cumulative impact. The 2021–2024 cumulative loss to Good Causes is estimated at over €250m, with structural growth as bookmakers expand digital distribution.

Charities Institute Ireland's endorsement is strategically important: it shifts the framing from "lottery operator vs. bookmakers" to "civil society vs. bookmakers."

The Likely Outcome

Three regulatory responses are on the table:

• Statutory ban on bookmaker betting on Irish lottery draws (Premier Lotteries' preferred outcome).
• Mandatory levy — bookmakers offering lottery-derivative markets contribute a percentage of relevant turnover to Good Causes, modeled on the UK horseracing levy.
• Status quo with enhanced disclosure — point-of-sale and digital advertising must clearly state that bookmaker bets do not fund Good Causes.

Given the political optics of charities publicly aligned with the lottery operator, some form of intervention is the higher-probability outcome. Operators with significant Irish lottery-betting books should be modeling revenue under both a levy and a ban scenario.

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Last verified: May 2026