Archbishop slams sweepstakes as a threat to moral life of people
Dublin, 26 February 1923 - The Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, John Gregg has slammed a suggestion that sweepstakes should be legalised for the purposes of charity.
A proposal introduced to the Dáil along these lines has received a cool response from the relevant Minister, but the Archbishop told his Congregation at St. Patrick’s Cathedral yesterday that the creation of additional facilities for money-making though the appeal to chance did nothing for public welfare and did not constitute good public policy.
The Archbishop said that he was not intent on making sins of behaviours that were not sinful and that he saw nothing wrong with playing for small sums of money or making a small bet - it was, he explained, no worse than spending a few shillings on sweets. However, he had no difficulty in denouncing the sweepstakes suggestion as wrong.‘The whole thing, from beginning to end, is wrong ’, he emphatically remarked. Clarifying, however, he added that it ‘is not the thing that is wrong so much as its tendencies.’
And the dangerous tendencies are the staking of money on chance. Most people live humdrum lives, the Archbishop explained, so the reiterated appeal to chance is unhealthy and over-stimulates the minds because betting and gambling offers an ever-renewable relief from the depressing sameness of repetition. They provide an artificial stimulus for lives which know very little variety.
Furthermore the promotion of gambling was, the congregation at St. Patrick’s were told, a stimulus to greed and a love of money. ‘No honest man pretends that he joins in a sweepstake because he wants to improve the breed of horses or because he wants to help a charity.’ Rather it is the prizes that attract him and the Archbishop maintained that the State should not take any step that encourages citizens in this direction or assists in ‘shaking the moral life of the population to its foundations.’
[Editor's note: This is an article from Century Ireland, a fortnightly online newspaper, written from the perspective of a journalist 100 years ago, based on news reports of the time.]
