{"id":78800,"date":"2025-10-14T00:28:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T00:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/78800\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T00:28:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T00:28:07","slug":"e2500000000-on-the-dogs-and-the-geegees-thats-ireland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/78800\/","title":{"rendered":"\u20ac2,500,000,000 on the dogs and the geegees? That’s Ireland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ireland\u2019s 25-year-old gravy train got another handy few bob \u2014 not far short of a hundred million \u2014 in this year\u2019s Budget<\/a>. Nodded through. No questions asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Year after year, no matter what other pressing needs there might be, we write in another huge allocation to one special fund. All ring-fenced, all guaranteed, never any scrutiny. How much longer will they get away with it?<\/p>\n

To explain \u2014 and this is something I\u2019ve written about before \u2014 there is only one area of Irish life, only one, that receives a guarantee of money built into the law of the land year after year. It was there again this year in the Budget.\u00a0<\/p>\n

They updated a law that is now 25 years old in order to keep the guarantee going and to keep the money flowing. In that time, give or take a few bob, that one sacred area of Irish life has seen an investment, by us, of more or less \u20ac2.5bn.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at that in numbers, and I hope I\u2019ve got this right because I really struggle to get my head around it. \u20ac2,500,000,000. Nice.<\/p>\n

The sacred area that is guaranteed all this money is not the building of enough hospital beds to get rid of waiting lists for suffering children. It\u2019s not the provision of enough speech and language therapists to eliminate a long-standing disgrace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the provision of the kind of supports that older people need to live independently. They\u2018re the sort of things that, if only we could get it right, would make you proud to be Irish.<\/p>\n

But there are no guarantees around those areas, no ring-fenced money that can go nowhere else. Yes, there\u2019s investment in those public policy needs, but they have to fight every year for an equitable, never a guaranteed, share of resources.<\/p>\n

The only guaranteed area is horse and greyhound racing. Year after year the money is doled out, no questions asked, no judgement, no critique. Year after year at least some of that money is poured down the drain.<\/p>\n

The Horse and Greyhound Industry Fund<\/p>\n

The Houses of the Oireachtas passed a law in 2001. In both the D\u00e1il and the Seanad it was passed unanimously. Both houses featured jokey and jolly debates \u2014 the entire thing went through all stages in the Senate in less than a day.\u00a0<\/p>\n

People like me back then, in our backrooms, tried to scream and shout about the immorality of the entire exercise. I failed completely, and I feel the shame of that every time I see another budget guarantee. Billions of euro later, no-one will take it on.<\/p>\n

The Bill passed into law back then established, for the first time, the Horse and Greyhound Industry Fund, and it said (forgive the legal language):<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Minister shall pay into the Fund out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas, in the year 2001, an amount, determined by the Revenue Commissioners, equivalent to the revenue paid into the Exchequer in the year 2000 from excise duty on off-course betting.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then in the next paragraph: \u201cThe Minister shall pay into the Fund out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas, in the year 2002 and in each subsequent year, an amount, determined by the Revenue Commissioners, equivalent to the revenue from excise duty on off-course betting paid into the Exchequer in the preceding year or the year 2000 increased by reference to the Consumer Price Index, whichever is the greater.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

We were all supposed to believe that under the new legislation, the Fund would get whatever revenue was raised from betting tax. Really, it was suggested, it would be the bookies that would pay up.<\/p>\n

But they did away with betting tax at exactly the same time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"FromFrom the moment the Horse and Greyhound Industry Fund became law, there wasn\u2019t a red cent in revenue from the bookies. File photo: Barry Cronin\/PA<\/p>\n

From the moment the Fund became law, there wasn\u2019t a red cent in revenue from the bookies. So, what that gobbledegook actually meant, and the way it has been applied ever since, is that the Fund is guaranteed every year the exact amount it got in 2001, increased each year by whatever the current rate of inflation was.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And we pay it, not the bookies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a 25-year old scandal that gets nodded through our national parliament every year. And it\u2019s a scandal in several different ways.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t object to taxpayers\u2019 money subsidising sport. I never have. But it needs to be subject to annual policy decisions. It needs to argue its case like everyone else does. It needs to fit into a set of national priorities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There needs to be scrutiny, debate, accountability, just like there is with every other area of public spending. There should be no untouchable place for one sport against all the others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we had spent \u20ac2.5 billion on the development of football over the years, would we not be in a position to be more confident in our national team than we are?<\/p>\n

Division of the spoils<\/p>\n

Also, look at how it\u2019s divided. Just over \u20ac2bn, or 80%, of the money goes to horseracing every year. Give or take, that\u2019s \u20ac80m a year of taxpayers’ money for the gee-gees.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Horse Racing Ireland don\u2019t publish bang up to the minute figures for the prize money they give out, but their most recent figures tell us they gave out \u20ac67m.<\/p>\n

The vast bulk of that went to owners. In the year they reported, two of Ireland\u2019s richest men by far accounted for nearly \u20ac3m of the prize money. And it\u2019s hard to find any paupers in the rest of the list. (Oh, by the way, prize money is tax free \u2013 even for people who are tax resident in Ireland.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all really weird, and the complete lack of accountability for all that public money going to rich people is utterly unacceptable. They are the prime beneficiaries of an industry that ought to be able to stand on its own feet but instead laps up enormous amounts of public money year after year.<\/p>\n

A dying sport<\/p>\n

Whatever about the horses, there is a much darker side to the whole dog thing. Ireland is now the only country in the entire world that invests public money in a greyhound racing industry that is so barbaric it has virtually disappeared everywhere else.<\/p>\n

Yet this year we gave them nearly \u20ac20m and since this ring-fenced fund was set up we have ploughed in hundreds of millions of euro.<\/p>\n

To a sport that is dying. According to their own figures do you know what the average attendance at a greyhound race meeting is? 220 people. That\u2019s it. Half a billion euro in subsidy and they can\u2019t even attract an audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Our national theatre, the Abbey, gets a much smaller subsidy than the dogs, and it functions as a national ambassador for the entire country. An ambassador to be proud of.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just the sport that is dying, the industry has become a byword for cruelty. Cianan Brennan in this paper has reported<\/a> on the increase in deaths and injuries suffered by the dogs \u2014 the state body calls it all very regrettable \u2014 and that\u2019s only part of the story of wanton cruelty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Taxpayers are paying for this. It needs to stop. This awful business needs to be put out of its misery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland\u2019s 25-year-old gravy train got another handy few bob \u2014 not far short of a hundred million \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":78801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5244,14376,61,60,43],"class_list":["post-78800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-budget-2026","tag-greyhound-racing","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}