Investigation into postponement of National Lottery draw
Regulator to investigate technical glitch which led to the cancelling of the Lotto draw for the first time in 28 years
Print10 February 2015
The National Lottery regulator, Liam Sloyan has requested a report on the technical issues, which forced the postponement of the midweek Lotto draw on 4 February.
Retailer group RGDATA had requested that the regulator would investigate the technical glitch which led to the cancelling of the Lotto draw for the first time in 28 years.
RGDATA director general Tara Buckley said: “We are surprised that the National Lottery didn’t have a contingency plan in place. RGDATA will be following up with the National Lottery and the regulator as a matter of urgency”.
The National Lottery was forced to postpone its €10 million midweek draw on 4 February due to a major technical problem meaning the midweek Lotto draw took place on a Thursday evening instead of a Wednesday.
Up to 3,500 retailers had problems with their ticketing terminals and as a result thousands of customers were unable to purchase their tickets on the Wednesday.
Premier Lotteries Ireland (PLI), who signed a license to operate the National Lottery for the next two decades last year, said that it appeared the problem arose when retail systems were not able to connect due to a glitch with Telefonica in Spain.
Speaking on RTE’s ‘Morning Ireland’ programme, the group’s director of marketing Eddie Banville said the outage was outside their control.
“We were very disappointed that this disruption inconvenienced our players and our retailers but this particular issue was entirely outside of our control,” said Banville.
“It happened on the worse day because we had a jackpot of €10 million which is the biggest jackpot we have had in quite some time.”
Banville said he was confident the same thing would not occur again and said that the issue had nothing to with ongoing problems some retailers and agents are claiming they are experiencing with National Lottery terminals.
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