Fergus Finlay: €2,500,000,000 on the dogs and the geegees? That's Ireland
Year after year the Budget doles out money, no questions asked, no judgement, no critique, to horse and greyhound racing. File photo: INPHO/Nick Elliott
Ireland’s 25-year-old gravy train got another handy few bob — not far short of a hundred million — in this year’s budget. Nodded through. No questions asked.
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?
To explain — and this is something I’ve written about before — 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.
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 €2.5bn.
Let’s look at that in numbers, and I hope I’ve got this right because I really struggle to get my head around it. €2,500,000,000. Nice.
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’s not the provision of enough speech and language therapists to eliminate a long-standing disgrace.
It’s not the provision of the kind of supports that older people need to live independently. They‘re the sort of things that, if only we could get it right, would make you proud to be Irish.
But there are no guarantees around those areas, no ring-fenced money that can go nowhere else. Yes, there’s investment in those public policy needs, but they have to fight every year for an equitable, never a guaranteed, share of resources.
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.
The Houses of the Oireachtas passed a law in 2001. In both the Dáil and the Seanad it was passed unanimously. Both houses featured jokey and jolly debates — the entire thing went through all stages in the Senate in less than a day.
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.
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):
“The 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.”
Then in the next paragraph: “The 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.”
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.
But they did away with betting tax at exactly the same time.
From the moment the Fund became law, there wasn’t 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.
And we pay it, not the bookies.
It’s a 25-year old scandal that gets nodded through our national parliament every year. And it’s a scandal in several different ways.
I don’t object to taxpayers’ 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.
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.
If we had spent €2.5 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?
Also, look at how it’s divided. Just over €2bn, or 80%, of the money goes to horseracing every year. Give or take, that’s €80m a year of taxpayers' money for the gee-gees.
Horse Racing Ireland don’t publish bang up to the minute figures for the prize money they give out, but their most recent figures tell us they gave out €67m.
The vast bulk of that went to owners. In the year they reported, two of Ireland’s richest men by far accounted for nearly €3m of the prize money. And it’s hard to find any paupers in the rest of the list. (Oh, by the way, prize money is tax free – even for people who are tax resident in Ireland.)
That’s 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.
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.
Yet this year we gave them nearly €20m and since this ring-fenced fund was set up we have ploughed in hundreds of millions of euro.
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’s it. Half a billion euro in subsidy and they can’t even attract an audience.
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.
It’s not just the sport that is dying, the industry has become a byword for cruelty. Cianan Brennan in this paper has reported on the increase in deaths and injuries suffered by the dogs — the state body calls it all very regrettable — and that’s only part of the story of wanton cruelty.
Taxpayers are paying for this. It needs to stop. This awful business needs to be put out of its misery.
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