'Crazy' new gambling laws proposed by the government could be a step in the wrong direction according to Armagh football legend Oisin McConville.
McConville, who battled a serious gambling addiction during his playing days, thinks that a government plan to increase the maximum stake on betting machines from just 3c to €5 isn't the right move.
"I just think that the timing of it, it's all madness to me. It's actually gone the other way completely in the UK.
"They brought an £100 stake at the bookies down to £2 stake. You can imagine that is a step in the right direction first and foremost and it seems insane that we would be going in the opposite direction.
"The studies, the information on the ground is that there's more people in Ireland with gambling issues than there ever has been before.
"As far as addictions are concerned - it's got the highest rate of suicide. It's the most secretive of all the addictions, because people are only asking for help in an absolute crisis when their world has come tumbling down around them.
"And I'm not just talking about finances, I'm talking about life in general; family life, social life, work life.
"The fact that we are moving in the opposite direction of what the rest of Europe certainly is moving in is a crazy decision to me," McConville said on RTE Morning Ireland yesterday.
Under the Gaming and Lotteries Act 1956, players are allowed a maximum stake of 3c and a maximum pay-out of 50c on gaming machines.
And in a move to modernise legislation, the government is planning to increase that stake to €5 and the maximum pay-out to €500.
But McConville fears that this will encourage gambling on gaming machines, a habit that led to develop his own addiction.
McConville added: "When I started gambling on these machines, I was losing everything I had. It wasn't a lot, but that's not the point.
"People are gambling above their means, and that's what I learned: the more money I had, the more I would gamble.
"When I was younger, that's how I started gambling - it was machines and that advanced to poker machines. From poker machines it advanced to horses, it went to cards, it went to football matches.
"I was basically gambling everything then, but that was my initial contact with gambling because it was one of the things that gave me the buzz".
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