The Horse and Greyhound Fund is closing in on its 25th birthday and has long since moved from stimulus to subsidy. If the original broad economic push transformed Irish racing, reliance on State funding looks more like dependence with each passing year.
It’s why the Government’s recent budget decision to freeze its 2026 allocation at €79.3 million has prompted unease. Dutiful public noises of gratitude were made but privately there’s no little resentment, enough in fact to apparently make Donald Trump look good.
The orange grotesque in the White House is busy tearing up democratic conventions and threatening global stability. In racing’s own ecosystem, though, what’s really registered is how he has transformed the US bloodstock by his ‘big, beautiful bill’.
As part of broader agricultural measures, Trump has reintroduced bonus depreciation. It’s basically a tax break that means 100 per cent of a thoroughbred purchase can be written off in the first year of ownership.
As an exercise in making the rich even richer it’s shameless stuff. It used to be a swizz for the purchase of private jets and other wildly expensive luxury items. Racehorses are few people’s idea of a necessity either, although the impact on this year’s US yearling sales was colossal.
If the tax-dodge ethics are skeevy, Trump’s minding of his fellow rich is widely regarded as a stimulus boon for the American bloodstock industry.
New money has flowed in as the wealthy, and their tax advisers, cultivate a newfound appreciation for the thoroughbred. Envious eyes are being cast from across the Atlantic and even muttering about the need for a similar sort of initiative here.
A stimulus can be transformative. Ireland’s tax-free status for stallion fees, introduced by Charles Haughey in 1969, revolutionised the bloodstock sector here. By the time it was abolished, Ireland was, and remains, Europe’s dominant jurisdiction in breeding racehorses.
Trickledown theory
Trump’s move is basically a variation on trickledown theory, the hoary old line employed by the very rich to justify concentrating wealth in their own hands on the supposed basis that it will eventually percolate everywhere.
As a social and economic model, it’s about as credible as feudalism. But the evidence of a hyper-yearling market in the US this year is that a short, sharp jolt can get money churning through the market. The ultimate test of such a move, however, is how it sticks.
Such a stimulus is akin to getting rid of stabilisers and holding the seat of a kid’s bike as they’re learning to ride. The whole point is to let go at some point, allow them to proceed under their own steam. Having to keep holding on is failure.
The 2001 Horse and Greyhound Fund was Irish racing’s own transformative stimulus. Guaranteed government money flooded into the sport, helping to produce the most successful era in its history. Those within the sport hardly knew themselves. And, as is the way of such things, excitement first turned to expectation and then to entitlement.
The amount of State money to have gone through the fund since it was established is closing in on €2 billion. By any measure it has been a remarkably consistent commitment from the State. It makes disgruntlement at the latest budget allocation smack of eaten bread soon being forgotten.
But the context is a sport that feels itself under increased pressure. Over two decades of prioritising government funds towards prize money – racing’s own version of trickledown economics – has produced a current scenario of widespread complaints about it not being enough.
Horse Racing Ireland supplies over 60 per cent of the €70 million in prize money up for grabs this year. As well as State funding, part of it comes from a media rights deal that’s tied in with a betting shop sector which appears to be on a rapid downward spiral, in Britain in particular.
Paddy Power has said it is closing 57 shops in Ireland and the UK. Evoke, the parent company of William Hill, is reportedly preparing to close almost 10 per cent of its shops. Betfred hasn’t ruled out closing all 1,272 of its branches.
Archaic
It may be sabre rattling ahead of next month’s UK budget, and the threat of increased taxes on gambling companies, or it may not be. But betting shops look more archaic with every passing year, and dividends from Irish racing’s media rights are bound up in them. It means there’s even more focus on what comes from government.
Long-standing claims about the sport’s financial model being essentially artificial, since Irish racing has always generated only a fraction of betting tax turnover, have usually been met by a HRI response that argued in terms of such funding being a stimulus.
But a stimulus is essentially short-term; Irish racing’s dependence on government funding is more pronounced now than ever.
Faced with dangerous economic headwinds, the sport’s response appears to vary little on a plaintive pitch of looking for more funding to pump into prize money so that those already wealthy enough to own racehorses feel better disposed towards continuing to do so.
It’s no easy sell outside of racing. And if you’re inside or outside, or whatever the label you choose, it’s legitimate to ask how sustainable a long-term outlook it can be if the State must still run alongside to hold you up.
Something for the Weekend
Aidan O’Brien is seeking a 12th Futurity success at Doncaster on Saturday and has three runners. ACTION (2.05) will look to many like a third string, but in a gruelling stamina test, he might represent the best value of all. Lambourn’s half-brother made all to win his maiden at Galway over an extended mile but missed the break in the Royal Lodge on his last start. Not much went right for him there but he still wound up a close third to Bow Echo.
INTENSE APPROACH (4.05) made light of the Ballybrit hill to win on his chasing debut at the Galway festival. A course winner over hurdles at Cheltenham, he returns there for a novice test on Saturday and can build on the promise of that Galway victory.
