VIDEO: Pigeon racing is flying high in Ireland

It’s a pastime associated with former Coronation Street character Jack Duckworth, but pigeon racing is alive and well in Ireland. And prize birds can be worth as much as €250,000, says Jonathan deBurca Butler

FROM David Murphy’s kitchen you can see a compact collection of dark-brown wooden sheds in his back garden. Behind a series of protruding platforms protected by thick, spaced wire mesh are the unmistakable, jutting struts of pigeons. “There’s about 60 of them out there at the moment,” says David. “I sent five of them down to a race in Skibbereen last night, but I haven’t heard anything from the fellas down in Cork, so there must be bad weather delaying the race today.” The previous evening, David had put the five pigeons into a pannier to be loaded onto a ‘transporter’ with hundreds of others and sent down to Cork.

David has been a pigeon-fancier since his youth. “They were always there,” says the 54-year-old secretary of the Rathfarnham and District Racing Pigeon Club. “My father had them and my brothers had them, before me. When you start racing them, you get that bug. It’s funny, my wife will probably tell you later, but we hadn’t a stick of furniture when we moved in here, in 1985, but I had the wood for my loft.”