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The island was invaded by Ted fans all dressed as nuns and priests and it was a little disconcerting to see them all get very friendly at the nightly disco!

The highlight of the weekend was the Craggy cup which was a beach football match played between the neighbouring islands of Inis Mor and Inis Oirr for the right to be called Craggy Island. John Aldridge and Tony Cascarino flew in to manage the teams and Inis Mor emerged victorious.

The Irish General Election was one of the highlights of the year with all party leaders making their way to Paddy Power shops around the country to bet on themselves. We launched a hugely successful website called electionbetting.com which has become the one stop shop for betting on all things political.

The one event which left our rivals green with envy was the rugby world cup. We got behind Tonga and persuaded one of their star players, Epi Taione, to change his name to Paddy Power. It was all official, done by deed poll and everything.

However, the faceless IRB took a dim view of poor Paddy and refused to refer to him by his new name in any official correspondence like team sheets etc.

Then, eureka, the Tongan’s approached us and asked if we’d mind if they dyed their hair green for their crunch match against England. We were happy to oblige and promptly flew over a hairdresser with two big buckets of green dye to France and set to work.

It wasn’t as straight forward as you’d imagine. Because everyone had very dark hair it needed to be bleached before being dyed green. A production line of eight was set up and it took two hours per head to get them green.

It was a pretty surreal sight – 22 muscle bound Tongan giants doing each others hair!

The day before the match the IRB appeared in the Tongan team hotel and threatened the minnows with crippling fines if they took the pitch with green hair. Not because they had any logos or slogans, simply because they had green hair. White hair would have been fine, red hair would have been fine – just not green.

The green dream was over. The green dye was removed and unfortunately Tonga were beaten by England. At least everybody knew what nearly happened!

2007 will also be remembered as the year we plunged into spread betting. Another completely new product for Paddy Power punters – paddypowertrader.com. This is the chance for financial wizards to bet on the stock market without capital gains tax or stamp duty.

The year ended with a real balls up – a bingo balls up! We went big on bingo in December and ran what turned out to be quite a controversial advertising campaign asking the question “Where have all the women gone?” The most provocative ad depicted a father getting ready to breast feed a new born baby while his wife was obviously off playing bingo with Paddy Power – a pretty disturbing image!

The bingo campaign climaxed at Leopardstown races a couple of days after Christmas when we ran a competition for ladies to win Gucci handbags – we expected decent response but there was almost a riot! Men take note, women love handbags!