At 8.30 last Saturday morning Ian Marmion, chief executive of Victor Chandler Ireland, hit the hay with a smile on his face. The Galway Races had been a battle, but as the results began to move in favour of the bookies, it seemed a bloodbath had been averted. An exhausted Marmion and his team had stayed up all night over a few pints, trying to flush the unique Galway adrenaline from their systems.

However, the cash satchels were soon reopened.

“By the end of Friday evening we were back in front,” he recalled. “But it all went wrong again on Saturday and Sunday, and by the end of it (the seven days of racing) all the bookies had actually run out of cash. We got hosed.”

All punters will agree that to sympathise with the bookies’ squeals of poverty is akin to heresy. In fairness, however, to both punter and layer alike, Marmion is one of the good guys in the Irish industry.

He first popped up in the late 1990s as the public face of Paddy Power. Marmion’s enthusiastic, betting-crazed, pronouncements became a feature of the media landscape and played a part in Paddy Power’s leading role in transforming the gambling industry from satanic scourge to cuddly pastime.

Today Marmion is the Irish face of the eponymous Victor Chandler, one of the British betting industry’s legendary figures. “I don’t want to sound like I’m an arse-licker, but Victor is a tremendous fella,” he said. “When I went to him with the idea of expanding into Ireland he couldn’t have been more positive. Once I could make a good business case to him, he took it seriously and put his money where his mouth is.”

When the online gambling boom took off in the late 1990s Chandler recruited Marmion to become the online manager of his Gibraltar-based betting operations. By 2002, the Chandler operation in the Far East had hit a snag and Marmion, with his open charm, was recruited to aid the cause.

As a result he became close to Chandler himself — or VC as everyone in the industry refers to him. Marmion is unhesitatingly honest about how he implemented his career plan. “I had just got married and both myself and the wife wanted to come back to Ireland. I put myself in a position where I was able to get close to Victor.

“I bent his ear about Ireland and he agreed to give it a go. We began very simply in March last year with an Irish website. We always had a base of high-rollers over here, but the challenge was to recruit the smaller punters. Victor’s philosophy is that he’d prefer to have 5,000 people betting a euro then one fella betting five grand.”

By September last year, says Marmion, they knew they were in business and a decision was taken to push on with the plan. This year the company’s Irish operations, which comprise telebetting, online sports betting, online poker and the recently opened flagship betting shop on Dublin’s Upper Baggot Street, will register sales of €50m.

“Our business model is different to the likes of Paddy Power,” Marmion explained. “If our shops break even that’s a great achievement. The shops are there as a branding exercise and our profit is in online, telephone and poker.”

The high street presence will, by the end of 2007, comprise six stores, with two more in Dublin and one each in Cork, Galway and Limerick.

Far from the stereotype of the bookie in a loud check suit and booming voice, Chandler himself is a low-key, but not reclusive, character. His bet on moving offshore has been a huge success, although finding exact financial figures is difficult as the holding companies are private and registered in Gibraltar.