“The walls started to close in around me. Between borrowing money, and telling lies, and getting into financial difficulty, the walls were closing in.”

Niall McNamee (36), who was in his mid-teens when he started going to the bookies on Saturdays to place a few bets on horse racing, is talking about when his gambling addiction began to overwhelm him.

A few early wins had a bad effect.

“It planted a seed, that maybe I could make a few bob on this,” the Offaly county footballer says. “And that was how it started. It just went from being one day a week, to being two days a week, and eventually it was seven days a week.”