It was Cary Grant who apparently said that 500 small details add up to a favourable impression. But a single small detail at Fairyhouse last week hardly did much for popular perception of how Irish racing is regulated.
Jockey Danny Gilligan rode the JP McManus-owned Agameoftwohalves who was having his third career start in a maiden hurdle at Fairyhouse. He started a 12/1 shot. Another McManus runner, Mighty Park, got into the race as a reserve, was heavily punted into odds-on and won as he liked under Mark Walsh. Agameoftwohalves was fourth, beaten by 65 lengths.
Afterwards, as is the way of such things, an official approached Gilligan. Apparently, it was more informal than any suggestion of a possible running and riding inquiry but ultimately administrative enough for the IHRB’s stewards report on the day’s action to declare: “At the request of the race-day stewards, DJ Gilligan stated to the stewards’ secretaries that he had no comment to make on the running of Agameoftwohalves trained by Gordon Elliott.”
Gilligan gets full marks for originality. In the long and mostly tedious history of such reports, it was certainly new. There was a temptation to play it for laughs. The nature of authority is that it’s often a wall off which popular defiance can bounce. Apparently, Gilligan wasn’t obligated to elaborate but, trivial as it might have been, it wasn’t irrelevant.
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At the very least it smacks of dismissiveness. Why wasn’t Gilligan asked to comment further, or why didn’t the IHRB do more to engage with him? But nothing happened, although the incident was singular enough to be pointedly included in the final stewards’ report.
No comment, whatever the tenor or context, is a perfectly valid approach to take towards a nosy journalist. It’s diplomatic compared to replies some of us have received over the years. But it’s a different story when applied to those whose job it is to police the game.
Effective policing, whatever the sector, is about lots of different elements, but engagement is close to top of the list. It works best when those being policed have sufficient confidence and respect in those doing the policing that they play ball with the process. Opting out is a recipe for problems, serious or minor.
The scale of the task the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board is charged with in regulating racing here is huge as has been underlined with dispiriting regularity for more than a decade. Too often it has resulted in a credibility gap when it comes to public confidence.
Cases such as the Redwood Queen incident at Wexford in May, when, remarkably, no initial inquiry was called into a controversial unseating that was the talk of racing and beyond, only encouraged popular perceptions of a feather-light policing touch. There is a default instinct to assume a closed shop culture anyway without needlessly feeding it.
Trivial as it might seem, adopting an apparently high-handed approach, and nothing happening as a result, threatens to feed into public suspicion of how what they’re betting on and looking at is regulated. It has also set something of a precedent. The idea that others didn’t register Gilligan’s tack and mightn’t be tempted to employ it themselves is wishful thinking.
The disciplinary waltz has always prompted original manoeuvres when accounting for actions in the stewards’ room. Explanations that seem to bear little relation to the evidence of one’s eyes aren’t unusual. Sometimes there is verbal dexterity of a sort that can even provoke grudging admiration.
But at least there’s acknowledgment that there’s a game to be played and certain rules to it, one being that no one gets to not play. Napoleon’s line was that policing is about punishing severely in order to punish less although the emperor never had to keep a disciplinary lid on Irish racing.
Ultimately, a gesture such as Gilligan’s, and the weedy response to it, speaks of wider issues. According to some reports, the IHRB is an organisation where morale is on the floor and a series of legal cases are coming down the pike. There also seems to be a significant turnover of staff, which is rarely a good sign.
This is also an environment where, behind the platitudes, integrity appears to be a second-level priority at best when it comes to divvying out all-important financial backing.
An independent Indecon report commissioned by the Department of Agriculture recommended that the share of Horse & Greyhound Fund money given to racing for integrity and welfare purposes should be increased and ring-fenced. But Horse Racing Ireland is prioritising record prize money with the integrity budget upped by a comparatively meagre €500,000 this year.
Perhaps it’s little wonder then if there are some seemingly offhand attitudes to the regulator, or that things are allowed to slide sometimes. But weakened regulatory authority, whatever the scale of the issue, is ultimately no good for the game.
Something for the Weekend
Half the field in tomorrow’s Grade Two Mares Hurdle at Doncaster are Irish trained, including last year’s winner Jetara. At her best she will be a major player again, but she has been largely sub-par this season. In contrast, Feet of a Dancer (1.30) is on an upward curve and can prove it back at the three-mile trip over which she ran so well in the Pertemps Final at the Cheltenham Festival.
Straight John (2.10) made enough of an encouraging debut behind his stable companion Ballyfad at Leopardstown over Christmas to suggest he can land a maiden hurdle at Fairyhouse tomorrow.
