The chief executive of the National Lottery, Dermot Griffin, has said that the outage that led to the postponement of a Lotto draw for the first time in 27 years last month was a "once in a lifetime" event.
Presenting to the Oireachtas Finance Committee last week, Griffin said that "there have been some outages [to the lottery system], and some of these were out of our control because the Telefónica network in Spain fell over and brought down its backup."
He noted that the incident in question was "a really rare event for a big telecommunications operator" adding that a storm "brought down the link between the primary system and the backup system in Spain and, in the attempt to re-route traffic so that the backup would still be in place, an erroneous code was sent to the primary system, which brought that down too."
He also noted that the company had "flagged up in advance that this would be a challenging period", as the National Lottery was "in effect, running down one company and running another one."
Commenting on the Oireachtas Committee meetings, at which a potential price rise for National Lottery products was discussed, the Convenience Stores & Newsagents Association (CSNA) said in its weekly e-bulletin last Friday, "The higher the sales, the more we earn, the more winning tickets we process the more we earn. When the prices went up, we earned more. A sale of a €10 scratch card earns more than the sale of a €5 ticket. The last increase in prices was in 2006, nine years ago.
"Retailers should not be fearful or concerned with increases in the range of products with new and higher prices once the introduction of these products do not lead to a drop in the level of players that would negate the increases earned."
The CSNA also criticised newspaper coverage of the Committee hearing, adding "the papers critical of the Lottery considering a price increase would be well reminded that each and every one of them have had significant increases in RRP over the past 9 years, increases that were needed to cover costs and to re-invest."
© 2015 - Checkout Magazine by Stephen Wynne-Jones
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