Regulator of the National Lottery

The office was set up by the National Lottery Act 2013, and the first Regulator was appointed in November 2014, the same year the State moved the lottery to a private operator. Premier Lotteries Ireland DAC holds that licence, and since November 2023 it has been owned by La Française des Jeux, a change the Regulator reviewed for the fitness and probity of the new owners and directors.

Its functions under the Act are specific: to procure the holding of the National Lottery, to monitor and enforce the operator’s compliance with the Act and the licence, to approve certain matters such as game schemes, to manage and control the National Lottery Fund, and to enforce the lottery’s trademarks.

The order of its objectives matters.

The Act requires the Regulator to act in the way most likely to ensure the lottery is run with all due propriety, that participants’ interests are protected and that its long-term sustainability is safeguarded, and only after those three does it seek to make the return to good causes as great as possible within the licence terms. Those returns are fixed at 65 per cent of proceeds after prizes, and the office checks the operator’s allocation of sales to prizes and good causes each week, game by game.

Most players never deal with the office directly, because the operator runs the games and handles the first complaint, yet the Regulator sits behind almost every rule a player of Lotto or a scratchcard encounters.

It assesses game rules and play instructions before approving a game, oversees how quickly prizes are paid each month, watches for games with unusually high levels of unclaimed prizes and checks that the operator publicises large unclaimed wins. It also reviews the complaints the operator receives, looking at whether they are handled without delay and whether they point to a systemic problem.

Advertising falls under the same licence. Where a National Lottery advertisement does not meet the licence standards of fairness and accuracy, the Regulator orders its removal.

What I check first, when a reader writes in about a lottery dispute, is whether the complaint has already gone through the operator, since the Regulator’s oversight works on top of that process rather than replacing it.

The term is regularly confused with the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland, the body established under the Gambling Regulation Act 2024 to licence and regulate betting and gaming. The Regulator’s own submission to the Public Accounts Committee states that its role does not include charity or community lottos, bookmaker bets on lottery results, or any gambling outside the National Lottery. The table below sets out who is responsible for each activity, drawn from the Regulator’s published statements.

The Regulator has no role in deciding who receives good causes money, so applications for funding go to the relevant Government Department, not to the office.

Nor can it rewrite the licence at will: it may amend the licence only within set parameters and with the operator’s agreement, which is why changes to the lottery tend to come through approvals of new games and schemes rather than through new terms. The Fund it controls is a single account at the Central Bank of Ireland, and its annual accounts are audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General.

The office’s reporting is not beyond criticism, and a peer-reviewed study published in December 2025 argued that its annual reports give too little weight to gambling harm, a charge the Regulator answered by pointing to the measures against underage play and problem gambling introduced under the licence. For a reader, the practical lesson is narrower: a complaint about an online casino, whatever licence it holds, does not belong with this office.