The Betting and Gaming Council’s chief executive, Grainne Hurst, appeared before Westminster’s Treasury Select Committee in October, denying that gambling created “social harms”.<\/p>\n
She added that potential tax hikes risked pushing punters towards “an unregulated black market”.<\/p>\n
Philip McGuigan disagreed.<\/p>\n
McGuigan told BBC News NI that he has first-hand experience with the addictive and “predatory” nature of online gambling.<\/p>\n
“I have suffered at the hands of gambling harm, thankfully everyday now is a day in recovery.”<\/p>\n
“There were times, for example when I self-excluded from sites but during that period I was receiving e-mails from the same sites encouraging me back in with free bets, with other types of incentives.<\/p>\n
“We have seen that time and time again whether it’s through predatory advertising, predatory e-mails.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Betting and Gaming Council’s chief executive, Grainne Hurst, appeared before Westminster’s Treasury Select Committee in October, denying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[163,85,46,522,523],"class_list":{"0":"post-151687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-mental-health","12":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}