THE Minister of State for Tourism and Sport, Patrick Donovan has placed gender imbalance in positions of influence firmly back in the limelight with his plans to introduce legislation that would see sporting bodies face funding cuts if the split were to be any more disparate than 70:30.

No-one can argue with the desirability of a better balance, not just in sport, but in business, politics and all spheres of life. That there are so many hurdles is regrettable, making the rise of Jackie Murphy to the role of Ladbrokes’ director for Ireland (the top position in Ladbrokes Ireland, with the managing director title dispensed with) all the more remarkable; particularly so given that she left school after the Inter Certificate and worked her way up from ground level.

Ultimately, the Blanchardstown native was entrusted with navigating Ladbrokes Ireland’s examinership as retail operations manager and rewarded with the director’s role in September 2015.

DÓC: Tell us a bit about yourself Jackie. You left school young.

JM: I was highly intelligent, more than able for it, but I didn’t like the whole school ethos from the age of eight or nine. My father told me I couldn’t leave unless I had a job. I did my Inter Certificate and went on and did a London City & Guilds course in child and community care, which is where I learned to sew. I got a job in a sewing factory in Coolock and worked there for about a year or so.

Then I went off to Jersey for a summer season and worked in a baker’s. I really loved that, loved mixing with the public and it went from the poorest performing shop to one of the top shops because I just did a few things like putting newspapers into the little café for people to read. It got very busy so they moved me up.

I left in 1989, went to London for a weekend on the way home and decided to get a job and stay for Christmas. I got a job at Ladbrokes and the rest is history. I started in October 1989 thinking “this job will get me by.” I started as a cashier for four months, went on a trainee manager programme, became a shop manager very quickly after that and came back to Dublin in April 1992.

DÓC: Why did you progress so quickly?

JM: I have a very good work ethic. The first day I left the shop, I said “I’m not going back there’’ but within a week I loved it. I loved engaging with the customers; there was a great bit of banter. It was much different to what shops are now. There was a race every 10 or 15 minutes on a Saturday, two meetings every day. We finished at four o’clock in the winter. I genuinely enjoyed it and I worked with some really good people as well.

DÓC: It doesn’t sound like being a woman was an issue.

JM: At shop level, it’s predominantly women and always has been in betting shops. In the busiest, most prestigious shops back then, the managers would have been men. But in that time, it was a tough industry to get people into so you weren’t denied opportunities. I did notice that in Ireland, there were a lot more men in the shops than was the case in the UK.

With no managerial vacancies back home, Murphy worked in the Mary Street branch as a cashier but when a manager left the Camden Street branch, the job was hers. She worked throughout Dublin and was promoted as supervisor over a group of shops.

When legislation changed in 1998 allowing betting shops to remain open for evening racing and on Sundays, Murphy found the 65-70 hour weeks a grind while looking after a one-year-old daughter. She had written the programme for upskilling cashiers to deputy manager level so when an opportunity as training manager came up, she applied and was appointed in 2000. Two years later, she became involved in industrial relations and HR, in a time when attracting staff was extremely difficult with the country about to take off.

Ladbrokes invested heavily, with smaller shops moved out to main streets and significant acquisitions that increased the number of shops from 78 in late 1997 to a high of 223. But disaster lay around the corner.

DÓC: Why did Ladbrokes Ireland get into such trouble?

JM: We still had long leases on some of the old premises we were no longer using and while we sublet some of them, it wasn’t at the rent we were paying. We had a rent portfolio that would bring a tear to the eye. Like most people, we didn’t expect it to go bang when it did and not to the extent that it did. When things got really bad we had to make some really tough decisions in terms of closing shops, not renewing leases in some cases.

In 2012, there was a restructure of the company where they took the managing director role out of it and aligned us back to the UK. I was the head of retail operations at that stage and was asked to conduct a Deep Dive into the business and look the opportunities and challenges. We all knew the rents were a challenge and certainly the closed shops were a challenge. We couldn’t get tenants into the majority of them. We had, at one stage, 34 shops closed with two tenants in situ. That’s how extreme it got.

What we came out with from the review wasn’t very pleasant reading. It said basically you should either liquidate the business or sell off the good shops to try get away with a few quid or look to restructure the business in a way that allowed you to tackle some of the contractual stuff, which is what we did. When we mentioned this to the board first it was unpalatable. Nobody considered it.

DÓC: Was there ever a danger that Ladbrokes would pull out of Ireland?

JM: It was never expressed to me but I think anybody with a sensible head would have said “why are we staying in this business?” and if I was in the UK management team I would have asked the same question. It was make-or-break. We had to do something drastic. So that’s when examinership began to get talked about a lot more. All of the legal specialist advice we were taking was saying this was the only option available to the company.

HONEST WITH STAFF

It was tough but the one thing that was good about the process was that we had to be very open and honest with our people and we had to tell them: “Worst-case scenario, we will lose this business.” Much as that was shocking for people to hear, I think they respected the fact we were being open and honest, and I think that’s coming through in the business now in that people believe us, and they trust us that we really do want this business to work.

Some people were looking to go from five days to three and we accommodated all those people. It meant that we only lost 89 people in redundancies and every one of them on a voluntary basis, which was pleasing.

DÓC: What shape are you in now?

JM: We’re back in profit. Ireland has grown at 7% for this year. All of the costs from the property division are gone. The examinership process allows you to deal with all of those issues, pay all the landlords off and come out with a clean and healthy business. You’ve got to operate your business in a way that you maintain the cost base that you’ve established. You can’t afford to come out of examinership and start increasing your costs. We need to be very prudent for a number of years.

The thing we did well, from the feedback we get from customers and staff, is focussing on delivering offers that are relevant to the Irish market and relevant to the Irish customer. We’ve got a strong product team that drives that, delivering for Ireland and not just bringing UK offers into Ireland.

DÓC: And now you are director for Ireland. What are the challenges?

JM: For all the operators in Ireland now, we know the industry has had a huge amount of shrinkage. We’ve gone done from 1,380 shops in 2008 to about 880 shops now. That’s a massive decline in our sector. There are a number of factors – it’s not all down to recession. The increase in the online offering is significant. But there are a number of challenges facing retail operators.

Social responsibility is a huge one. Everybody’s got to start taking social responsibility very seriously and I think as an industry we’re taking great steps with the introduction of the T21 (Think 21), where we’re challenging people who look like they may be under 21 and not just under 18. It’s about protecting the vulnerable.

AML (anti-money laundering) legislation will be enacted in June next year and all operators will have to abide by the rules and regulations to ensure that criminality is kept out of the shops.

That’s one we have to be careful on. People think everybody in a betting shop is betting with the proceeds of crime. Well in excess of 90% of bets placed in a betting shop are with stakes of less than €13. So that’s not criminality.

There are a small number of high-staking customers that operators such as ourselves, Paddy Power, Boyles and the independents are happy to engage with under the directives, but what we can’t allow happen is that we become obsessed with the directive and it starts impacting on every customer in the shops, because that will drive business out of the shops.

DÓC: That’s an interesting statistic regarding the small-stakes betting. It is a claim of high-stakes backers in racing that they can’t get a decent bet on in a shop now.

JM: If somebody is known to the shops, there isn’t going be an issue with getting a big bet on. If somebody is well informed and continually beats us, we are a business at the end of the day so we will control that. We do have some big players and we know that they can afford to bet to those levels. In future those customers will have to be engaged to verify that they do have a level of income to bet at that level because from a responsible gambling point of view, if somebody is losing substantially to you, you have to make sure that they able to afford to do it at that level. But even at a staking point of view, to make sure that it’s not misappropriation of somebody’s funds somewhere.

DÓC: How important is the proposed new gambling legislation?

JM: The legislation we’re operating under now is from 1955 and 1931. There is nothing in there that allows for technological advances. If you took the gambling legislation as it’s currently written, we shouldn’t have TVs in the shops, we shouldn’t have window advertising; the legislation is so outdated; it’s about having a framework to work within and at the moment we just don’t have that.

When the Gambling Control Bill was drafted in 2013, we worked very closely with the IBA (Irish Bookmakers’ Association) and drafted a submission highlighting concerns with it, because there are lots of things in it that are very unclear and open to fairly different interpretation by different people. The introduction of an office of gambling control in Ireland would be very useful to operators because we’d all be working to the same guidelines. We need regulation that’s current.

There are lots of challenges. People can sit in my shop, drinking my free tea and coffee, pull out their phones, get on a gambling site playing roulette, games etc. When the Gambling Control Bill was printed, there was no revenue going to the government, and there still isn’t from gaming online, so online operators pay tax on sports books only. There has to be parity between online and retail. We should be able to offer similar products, in different guises of course, with different thresholds, but there should be some level of parity there.

DÓC: Are we talking about FOBTs?

JM: The Gambling Control Bill very specifically bans FOBTs in Ireland. They have them in the UK. I don’t know whether we’d ever need them in that format but I think there needs to be some level of acceptance that gaming is part of what goes on in the betting side.

DÓC: Ladbrokes’ online presence could be stronger, couldn’t it?

JM: It could be stronger and it will be stronger. We’ve seen great growth in our online business in Ireland this year and this is the first year we’ve been focussed on it coming out of examinership. Our market share in Ireland is still in single digits but it is substantially up on 2015 and we would plan for 2017 to be substantially up as well.

DÓC: What are your thoughts on guaranteed odds?

JM: Any bookmaker would tell you we don’t want to do best odds guaranteed. It goes against the principles of bookmaking, where you’re looking at your liability and you price your race accordingly. That goes out the window when you start guaranteeing odds but we do see that the challenge is it’s available online. So we do a Happy Hour every day and it does drive business and drive people into your shops. It does damage your margin but in terms of Ladbrokes re-establishing itself as a serious operator in Ireland, having a Happy Hour has helped us to win some market share.

DÓC: What is Ladbrokes’ sponsorship policy?

JM: We want to look at something that a) confirms we are committed to Ireland and b) delivers for us in terms of the whole brand. We are an operator in Ireland, committed to Irish sport. The Punchestown Champion Stayers’ Hurdle is a very prestigious race for us to be involved in. We’re coming to the last year of our three-year deal and we’ll certainly be looking to stay there. I think it’s a great sponsorship for us in terms of the coverage we get.

We are an associated betting partner with the FAI, and it shows our commitment to football and football products in Ireland.

We do lots of different sponsorships on racecourses on a smaller level. We will look to do a lot more sponsorship on a local level. Lots of clubs look for sponsorship but we can’t operate with under 18 teams but we do sponsor a few senior teams in football. We’d love to do a little bit more of that in the next year or two.

DÓC: What would you like to see from racing?

JM: It’s probably not in line with what everybody else thinks but we could do with less days when there’s no Irish racing taking place. That’s probably one of the challenges for us as an industry that we work better with HRI and the various people involved with the fixtures, to ensure that we don’t have two good meetings clashing on a Sunday in Ireland, and also looking at the use of all-weather in racing. We should be getting more out of Dundalk, certainly looking at where there are empty days with no Irish fixtures and filling them.

DÓC: What percentage of your turnover comes from racing?

JM: Horse racing in general would be more than 50% of our business. Irish racing is a smaller percentage.

DÓC: What does the future hold?

JM: We’ll remain focussed on delivering Irish customers offers that are relevant to them. We look at the products we’re offering on a regular basis and if it’s not working, we need to move very quickly and change what we’re offering.

We’ve had a very strong first year after examinership. We still have the challenge of maintaining the cost base but we’ve got good people in place and we’re all set to deliver even more for Ireland.