There’s a lollipop dispenser in Cork Airport, filled with the brightly packaged internationally popular Chupa Chups lolly.

The child can buy one lollipop for a set price, of they can pay a little more and take their chances as they might win four lollies.

If this sounds like a casino game for six-year-olds, that’s because it is. It’s gambling; it’s a game of chance for anyone tall enough to reach the coin slot and read the instructions.

It’s the same mentality with trading card games, where kids are buying packs of cards taking a chance that they’ll get a ‘rare’ one.

An international study published last year backs this up, including in the study the harm posed by loot boxes that can be bought in-play during video games.

Meanwhile, the Government is introducing new laws on gambling that will, magically, overcome the gambling instinct that is being hardwired into kids while waiting for a flight in Cork Airport.

The laws mean a ban on gambling ads between 5.30am and 9pm, ATMs will be banned from betting shops, and would-be or current gamblers can sign up to a National Gambling Exclusion Register to exclude themselves from accessing any online services.

Social media ads can no longer be indiscriminate, and they should only be shown to people who expressly subscribe to the service.

A 2023 survey published by the ESRI estimates that about one adult in 30 suffers from problem gambling.

That’s easy to believe, as we all know someone.

If you think you don’t, you simply haven’t wised up yet or admitted it to yourself.

The €20 that went missing from the bedside locker while your sister and her partner were babysitting, the secret problem until the couple goes to get a mortgage together, the in-game betting addiction that was a running joke amongst his friends and the girlfriend was the last one to know.

The woman who spends €100s on scratchcards every week and the sympathetic, appalled shopkeeper who can’t refuse to sell her them.

However, the incessant betting advertisements that line the pitch hoarding during soccer matches will continue during matches, and Elvis will continue to promote the National Lottery in a grim irony: his career was derailed by his manager Colonel Tom Parker who screwed him over royally and criminally to feed his own gambling addiction.

These new gambling regulations feel like a sticking-plaster on an open wound. Maybe the new Gambling Regulatory Authority and the Government have taken If I Can Dream to heart, and believe they can put on a show of taking action, with bloated aspirational gusto on a Las Vegas stage.

Government flexing their pearl mussels

Flooding in the east of the country was blamed rather famously now by the Minister for Housing James Browne upon Met Éireann.

Most people would struggle to pick the senior politician out of a lineup such has his silence been since appointed, but any minister in a storm, so to speak.

Attempts were made to blame the Enniscorthy flooding on the pearl mussel, which is snappier than citing all the other reasons for the refusal which are boring to read, yes, but nevertheless do exist.

The poor lamprey (a jawless fish) was also referenced in the planning refusal, but is apparently less sexy than the pearl mussel who gets rolled out regularly by politicians whenever they need to scratch that soundbite itch.

The pearl mussel was mentioned six times in a Dáil debate on Thursday.

The words ‘climate change’ were not mentioned at all. On Wednesday, An Taoiseach said the scheme in Enniscorthy was refused on the ‘basis of the pearl mussel or whatever’.

‘Or whatever’. Noah better get building that ark, because with that kind of thinking we’re going to need a bigger boat.