Gaelic Green and Gaelic Grey:
Irish Casinos Not Today, Maybe Tomorrow
PART I: Gaelic Casinos Today: The Color is Grey
Introduction
The tour book said Ireland has 40 shades of green.1 However, while the
casinos of the Emerald Isle do make some money (multi-colored euros, as it
were), they all are of one shade only: grey. Such is their legal status. Today.
In October 2007 I made my first venture to one of my ancestral homelands.
I had not previously considered going to Ireland because I orient travels around
studies of the casino industry. Ireland does not have casinos. Ireland is only one
of two European Union countries without casinos—the other is Cyprus. This
time I could be “just” a tourist and leave my scholar’s notebook at home.
But then it hit me—what wonderful research questions I could ask: Just
WHY doesn’t Ireland have casinos? And, are there any efforts to bring casinos
to Ireland?
In preparation I went to Google. Voila! I had been SO wrong. Entry after
entry told me that Ireland DOES have casinos. Further digging revealed that the
casinos are not authorized by law; however, they did operate openly as “private
member clubs.” A 1956 law was clear: houses where gambling games took
place are illegal.2 Slot machines are also illegal. But then the law is not all that
clear. There are exceptions, loopholes. Amusement centers can have machines
with small prizes, and owners of public houses can permit private games among
friends. The games have to give even chances for all players, stakes or fees for
playing had to be low, and the game operator could not realize any profits.3 So
the law was clear, yet not so clear.
For decades the spirit of law was followed with only a few card clubs—
mostly for poker—operating on its margins, with some amusement halls having
slot prizes not fully conforming to the law on prize limits. But the law had not
fully accounted for changes in Irish currency from pounds to a decimal system
to euros (€).
In the mid-1990s an effort to establish a large casino as part of a tourismconvention complex in Phoenix Park, Dublin, won local government zoning
approval, but failed to win enough political support to get to a vote in the Dail
(parliament).4 Only after the turn of the century did serious entrepreneurs and
operators seek to exploit the law’s loopholes and open “casino clubs.”
In 2000 a study report of the government urged that casinos remain illegal.5
In 2003 the Minister of Justice of Ireland, Michael McDowell, indicated that the
“clubs” were indeed illegal; however, because of the vagueness of the 1956 law,
it would be difficult to win criminal (beyond a reasonable d