Lotteries, Raffles, and Prize Draws
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 February 2025
This chapter explores the emergence, from the 1860s, of lotteries as a crucial fundraising tool for the Irish Catholic Church, one especially used to acquire capital to construct its rapidly growing built infrastructure. The chapter establishes the scale of the ‘drawings of prizes’ phenomenon, before arguing that lotteries worked effectively as a fundraising mechanism because they facilitated broad class engagement among the laity at home and held transnational appeal to the diaspora and non-Catholics alike. This chapter finally traces the roles of sectarian tensions, social and economic change, and legal limits in the gradual decline of such lotteries by the 1910s.
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