The racing festival has put its financial difficulties behind it and is ready to challenge Cheltenham as the premier racing event, its general manager tells Barry O'Halloran

Even while the dust from last month's Cheltenham national hunt festival was still settling, Punchestown was upping the pace for its equivalent in three weeks' time.

Partly because Cheltenham 2005 was the most successful in close to half a century for Irish-trained horses, Punchestown is confident that it can bring off its biggest festival ever.

Many of the nine Irish winners are trained in Kildare, but more importantly, the three which won Cheltenham's championship races, Hardy Eustace, Moscow Flyer and Kicking King, are all based in the county. As things stand, the latter two are scheduled to appear at their home track's festival.

Its general manager, Dick O'Sullivan, says the indicators are that this year's festival is going to be excellent.

"Our sales are good," he says, "our pre-sales tickets, given that Irish people don't tend to buy pre-sales tickets, are excellent. Our website and e-purchasing have come good."

In all, the course is expecting around 20,000 punters through its gates for the four-day festival (it runs from Tuesday, April 26th) and is hoping for a total attendance of closer to 90,000.

Of these, around 16,000, or 4,000 a day, are likely to be corporate guests, making it the biggest event in this sector in the country.

The bookies will stand to benefit (they always do, no matter what they tell you), as the organisers are projecting a betting turnover of €13 million. The spin-off to the local economy will be in the region of €30 million.

For the purists, Punchestown is about racing, but for a large number of those who will be at the track over the four days, the horses will be only one part of the mix of what is essentially a high-profile social event.

But it is also the racing that makes Punchestown. It is the premier Irish national hunt festival, and is second to Cheltenham, ahead of both this week's Aintree showdown and Sandown's end-of-season jumps gala.

Both of these tracks attempted to cash in on Punchestown's problems several years ago, and move themselves up the ladder a notch.

The Irish course responded by ensuring that as far as possible, both British and home-trained horses who had contested the leading Cheltenham races also ran at Punchestown.

Janet Williamson, its PR manager and wife of former jockey, Norman Williamson, successfully took responsibility for this.

O'Sullivan and his staff also focused on boosting prize money and sponsorship. This year, it is offering €2.1 million, a €400,000 increase on last year, with individual pots of between €100,000 and €225,000 for the grade one contests, which feature the best quality fields.

In order to ensure that domestic and overseas owners and trainers send their horses to the track, it has to guarantee prizes like this. O'Sullivan says that the Irish festival easily holds its own with Sandown and Aintree. To all intents and purposes, it's Ireland's Cheltenham.

But can it top the Costwolds version? Because of the profile that Cheltenham has with racing fans here, in Britain and further afield, that would be a big jump.

However, given the fact that much of the racing is already on a par with Cheltenham, O'Sullivan believes that it could rival it.

"I've no doubt about it, that as much as we'd want it to, Punchestown could be Cheltenham," he says. "And I've no doubt that the possibility of success in the future is absolutely sky high."

Cheltenham's character stems at least in part from the fact that so many Irish racegoers, horses, trainers and owners want to go there and win.

However, Punchestown is successful at attracting British-trained animals and people from the racing industry, and now it is also bringing in large numbers of punters from across the water.

Around 8,000 UK visitors will travel to Punchestown this year.

The course has been targeting them, not least because those that come tend to be big-spending racing fans. O'Sullivan predicts that this market is going to be increasingly important in the future for Punchestown.

Ultimately, Punchestown may have to add capacity, as the 20,000-plus visitors that it expects for this year's festival is about its limit.

All this might seem ambitious for a business that came close to falling at the final fence three years ago, but O'Sullivan says that it is now in profit, and predicts that when they are finalised, its 2004 accounts will show earnings of €400,000.

"If you put me against a wall, I would say there is a half a million a year business there," he says.

That business is made up of 19 days' of racing, the Oxegen rock festival, and a series of events run in the controversial event and exhibition centre.

It estimates that its total worth to the local economy is about €100 million.

But to a certain extent, there is still a shadow hanging over the course. The three-company structure established by the Kildare Hunt Club, its ultimate owners, borrowed a total of €7 million from four lenders, including the Getty family, which is owed €3.8 million, and AIB, which is owed €1.38 million.

On top of that, there were deals with Bord Fáilte, the Department of Agriculture and Horse Racing Ireland (HRI), which is also a creditor, which add up to further liabilities of €24 million.

O'Sullivan says that the €24 million is built into the business. If the business continues, and is successful, then there is no problem with that sum.

"But if the business folds in the morning, as it damn near did in 2002, then that would have to be paid back," he says.

As the company is now profitable, he believes that it can ultimately dispose of its debts .

O'Sullivan was part of a rescue package that HRI put together in late 2002 to stop the track from toppling at that final obstacle.

At the time, it was losing €500,000 a year. At the very least, it looked like it was heading for receivership.

"It was not a healthy situation, but at the time we looked at it and said that this business can be saved and can break even in 2003 if A, B, C and D are done," he says.

HRI said that it would come in, put in a management structure and run Punchestown as a joint venture with the hunt club. HRI would chair the board, get four representatives on the board, and the club would have four representatives on the board.

In the dying minutes of a fraught meeting in the autumn of 2002, Kildare Hunt Club accepted the deal.

O'Sullivan formally took over as general manager in 2003, and the business has progressed from there.

But the joint venture has never been signed, because some members of the club subsequently queried the validity of a series of leases given by the club to Blackhall Racing, the most important of the three operating companies.

HRI has put the joint venture on hold, and is working on getting a resolution with the Blackhall board, but this has been complicated by a dispute over the chairmanship of that body.

O'Sullivan is not involved in this and makes it clear that he would rather focus on running the race track. "We in the management team made up our minds that we'd divorce ourselves from the politics as far as possible and run the daily business, and that's what we do," he says.

They compensate for the lack of a board by holding a monthly management meeting, and inviting representatives of the hunt club and HRI to attend.

"We don't want to run a dictatorship," O'Sullivan says. "But all I can do is run a good, profitablebusiness and let that do the talking."