HOSPITAL FINANCE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LV, Issue 17454, 31 December 1930, Page 7

HOSPITAL FINANCE

' DUBLIN SWEEPSTAKE GOVERNMENT’S ACTION (Received Doc. 91, 10 a.m.) DUBLIN, Dec. 80. Apparently hospitals sharing in sweepstakes will not receive Government grants in future. The Richmond, Whitworth, and Hardwieke hospitals already have been informed that the annual grant of £3OOO will probably cease. Nine Dublin hospitals receive grants originally arranged by the British Parliament in 1854, ENGLAND WANTS LOTTERIES SUCCESS OF IRISH VENTURE LONDON, Nov. 22. The world-wide response to the Irisii sweepstake for hospitals that has enabled promoters to offer a glittering fortune of .€200,000 to the lucky holder of the ticket on to-day’s winner of the Manchester November Handicap, has stirred English hospital governors to action.

Realising that thousands of pounds are likely to go in future to Ireland and that benefactions to English hospitals will suffer in consequence, Sir George Campbell, governor of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, the father of all British hospitals) has decided to send out a questionnaire to 50,000 people of all classes, including religious bodies, asking them if they object to sweepstakes, would they favor asking Parliament to amend the existing law, and would they support a sweepstake conducted outside Britain when visiting a country where sweepstakes are legal. Sir Gordon says it is absurd that turf betting is everywhere allowed i|i England for the enrichment of bookmakers, but hospitals are debarred from benefit. Excessive taxation has reduced rich people’s capacity for gifts. to hospitals, with a result that most of them are short of funds. If it were possible to organise a sweepstake outside Britain he would see, he says, that 33 per cent, of it went to the hospitals in this country—a welcome addition to their restricted finances. Pour sweepstakes a year would mean a regular income of €1,300,000 for charity.

On the other hand, opponents of sweepstakes argue that they encourage trickery, corruption and blackmail on the turf. There is nothing, for example, to prevent an unscrupulous racehorse owner saying to the holder of the ticket that might carry a fortune with it, that he would not allow his horse to run unless that fortune was shared with him.