A tax on foreign fools

The Irish Sweep: A history of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstake 1930-87

By Marie Coleman

(UCD Press, €50.00 hb / €28.00 pb)

Tony Farmar

An unkind economist once referred to lotteries and sweepstakes as ''taxes on fools''. What distinguished the Irish Hospital Sweepstake, the subject of this fine book, is that so much of its income came from abroad - from foreign fools, in fact.

At the beginning of the 1930s two-thirds of the money gambled came from Britain. This was generally regarded in England as rank hypocrisy while de Valera was grandstanding his refusal of the Annuities, so the laws against illegal lotteries were tightened. By the end of the 1930s half of the Sweep's income was coming from America and Canada.

The Sweep, as it was always called, began in 1930 with a bang. For years the government had in its puritanical way resisted issuing lottery licences. But now the voluntary hospitals, the backbone of the health system, were in dire financial trouble with rising medical costs and tumbling donations. One of the worst off, Holles Street maternity hospital, threatened to close wards. Something had to be done, and in the recessionary climate of the day the only hope was to permit a gamble.

In 1932 the organisers ran sweepstakes on three British races (''another piece of infernal cheek'', spluttered one MP) the Grand National, the Derby and the Cesarewitch, grossing £11 million in sales and distributing £2.3 million to hospitals - and as the enabling act permitted - pocketing £243,000 for themselves.

In these days when we all talk so casually of billions it is difficult to understand the prodigious scale of these sums. To put them into perspective, the total income tax receipts in 1930/31 were £4.2 million, and the ordinary running costs of all the fifty or so hospitals in the country were less than £600,000 a year.

So this was big money, and virtually all of it coming from abroad. For various reasons 1932 was a high spot, but the Sweep itself went on for another 55 years.

In that time, as Marie Coleman tells us, the fat flow of money attracted all sorts of dodgy characters, like flies to carrion. It also provided sorely needed employment for thousands in Dublin; supplemented the dress allowances of respectable middle-class housewives who sold tickets to British friends, and built over 200 hospitals.

Historians tend not to be polite about the Sweep, adducing the dubious practices (a lot of smuggling and bribes) necessary to sell tickets in Britain and the USA where lotteries were illegal; they point enviously at the fortunes made by the organisers; and they denounce (with reason) the mean-spirited ending of the organisation.

Now Marie Coleman has written the definitive account of this ambiguous but important national institution.

In her conclusion she describes the Sweep as one of the greatest missed opportunities in the history of the state, a chance to create a superb medical service based on a three-legged model of hospitals, community medical services and an upgraded GP service (as brought forward in the Department of Health's 1945 plan, and still on the HSE's agenda).

That this did not happen she blames on a combination of the factional interests of the medical profession and the voluntary hospitals scratchily relating to an unimaginative government service. So no change there.