For more than half a century, the Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake turned a horse race and a drum of paper tickets into a global event. Here’s how it worked, why it reached so far and what it left behind.
Ask an older relative about the Sweep and watch their face change. For a good fifty years, a small paper ticket bought in Dublin could end up in a coat pocket in Boston, a drawer in Bombay or a biscuit tin in Kuala Lumpur and for one afternoon every few months the whole world seemed to be waiting on a horse race and a drum full of names.
Ireland’s taste for a flutter has stuck around, it has just changed shape. These days it is more likely to involve an app, and some of the brands behind those apps have woven themselves into Irish sport, such as NetBet, which became Shamrock Rovers’ Responsible Gambling Partner in February 2026 with its name on the first-team sleeve. Long before any of that, though, the biggest game in the country was a lottery with a very Irish twist.
How the Sweep Began
The Irish Free State Hospitals’ Sweepstake was set up in 1930 to raise money for the country’s hospitals, at a time when several of them were badly short of funds. Three men ran it. Richard Duggan was a Dublin bookmaker who had been running sweepstakes for years. Spencer Freeman, a Welsh-born engineer, designed the systems for mixing and drawing tickets. Joe McGrath brought the political connections.
The first draw took place in November 1930, tied to the Manchester November Handicap. Buy a ticket, and if your counterfoil was drawn, you were matched to a horse in a big race. If that horse won, so did you.
Later draws were tied to the Grand National, the Derby and the Cambridgeshire and the prize pools grew quickly. The fund for the 1932 Grand National came to almost £2.3 million, an extraordinary sum for the time.
The Greatest Show in Ballsbridge
What made the Sweep different was the theatre. Early draws were held at the Mansion House, then from 1940 at the RDS in Ballsbridge and they were proper events. Nurses in uniform drew counterfoils from enormous rotating drums while crowds and cameras looked on.
Before the draws, parades of floats carried the drums through the streets of Dublin. Ticket loaders wore elaborate costumes themed on travel, sport or ancient Ireland and one 1930s loader’s dress now sits in the National Museum, decorated with a motor car and a cricket bat. It’s hard to imagine a modern lottery bothering with any of that.
At its peak in the 1950s, the Sweeps headquarters in Ballsbridge employed as many as 4,000 people.
A Ticket That Travelled the World
The Sweep’s reach was the remarkable part. Tickets were sold in more than 150 countries, from the United States to India and Malaysia. In Britain, the US and Canada lotteries weren’t legal. No, millions of tickets crossed the Atlantic and the Irish Sea anyway, often tucked inside letters and passed from hand to hand by emigrants and their families.
For the Irish abroad, a Sweep ticket was a small link with home. Buying one was a bit like sending a postcard in reverse, a piece of Dublin arriving in a New York apartment or a London boarding house. It’s easy to picture plenty of them changing hands over a pint, in the pubs that have always been at the centre of Irish social life, as this deep dive into the Irish pub makes clear.
Winners became local celebrities. A Waterford carpenter won £26,275 in 1969, and a Kildare man won £10,000 on his wedding day in 1984, which must have made for some speech.
From the Sweep to the National Lottery
By the 1980s the Sweep had run its course. The government decided to set up a national lottery, the licence went to An Post in 1986 and the final Sweepstake draw was held in January of that year. The company itself was wound up in March 1987.
The National Lottery picked up where the Sweep left off, with the same idea of turning small stakes into money for good causes. Irish National Lottery players have raised more than €7 billion for good causes since the lottery began, according to the National Lottery. In 2024 alone, €239.3 million went to local good causes around the country.
The Same Spirit, a Different Ticket
Look at how Ireland plays today and the Sweep’s fingerprints are everywhere. The National Lottery draws, the Christmas raffle in the local GAA club, a few euro on Cheltenham with friends. The ticket has gone digital, but the appeal of a long shot coming good hasn’t changed much at all. No, if anything, the Irish love of a good story about a lucky win is as strong as ever.
Modern gaming comes with something that was unheard of in the Sweep’s day. Licensed operators now provide deposit limits, time-outs and reminders and the whole thing is strictly for adults over 18.
The drums and the floats are long gone, along with the costumed loaders and the nurses at the RDS. Still, for a few decades a ticket printed in Dublin really did travel the world, and plenty of families still have a story about the year somebody’s uncle nearly won the Sweep.
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