Galway bucked the trends with increased crowds last year© Photo Healy Racing
During the past week I noticed a number of adverts appearing on my social media feeds promoting the social and economic impact of horse racing in different counties and regions of Ireland produced by Horse Racing Ireland (HRI).
Delving a little further into this I see that HRI has taken the report it commissioned from Deloitte last year and has broken it down into segments to push a positive narrative about the economic benefits of the horse racing industry to local areas.
These standalone soundbites paint a rosy picture of the industry, but make particularly interesting reading when you compare the different counties and regions to each other.
HRI tells us that Tipperary’s horse racing and breeding sector is made up of 798 breeders and 70 trainers and this supports 3,025 jobs within the county.
Kildare with 54 less breeders (744) and an extra 6 trainers (76) supports 4,535 jobs. Hard to believe there are 50% more jobs in the sector associated with Kildare than Tipperary based on those numbers.
Even more surprising is that Meath/Dublin (these two counties are coupled in the promotions produced by HRI), an area with a total of just 550 breeders and 80 trainers, supports 5,437 jobs. An area with 248 less breeders than in Tipperary and just 10 more trainers, but 2,212 more jobs created.
Some of the biggest breeding and training operations in the world are based in Tipperary, but presumably that doesn't directly translate into jobs.
If we then compare the numbers of jobs associated with each county/region to the money generated in that area things get even harder to fathom. HRI tells us that the 5,437 jobs in Meath/Dublin generate expenditure of €390 million per year which equates to €71,730 per job. The ratios in Kildare (€122,822) and Tipperary (€108,760) are way higher, but nothing in any part of the country comes remotely close to Kerry.
The 351 jobs associated with the industry in Kerry generate expenditure of €58 million per year which gives a ratio of €165,242 per job.
Think about this for a minute - the 351 jobs associated with the horse racing and breeding industry in Kerry generate €8 million more per annum than the entire 2,849 similar jobs in Northern Ireland.
The ratio between one job associated with the industry in Northern Ireland and annual expenditure in the province is £14,742, a little over 10% of the equivalent value of one job in Kerry.
You’d have to wonder what is going on in Kerry and why no one else can replicate it? Perhaps HRI should consider relocating the entire industry to the Kingdom.
Having seen the figures for the numbers of registered breeders and trainers in each county/region I was curious to see how these numbers compare to previous years, but wasn’t prepared for some of the shocks I got trawling through HRI’s annual Factbooks.
According to HRI there were 1,083 registered breeders and 88 licensed trainers in the county of Tipperary in 2009. These numbers have now fallen to 798 breeders and 70 trainers. There have been similar drops in most areas of the country.
In fact, if the ‘facts’ are to be believed the total number of registered breeders in Ireland in 2009 was 9,530 and there were 778 licensed trainers across the island.
By 2022 those numbers had fallen to 6,593 registered breeders and 580 trainers.
In 2023 the registered breeder numbers had dipped again to just 6,154 and licensed trainers to 577. In the space of just 12 months from 2022 to 2023 the industry lost 450 registered breeders.
In 14 years the industry has lost 3,376 breeders and 201 trainers. That is 35% of all registered breeders and 25% of all licensed trainers have simply disappeared. Very concerning figures.
Another interesting set of statistics to emerge from my deep dive into HRI Factbooks is that the average attendance at an Irish race meeting in 2004 was a whopping 5,373 people. By 2011 that figure had fallen to 3,587 and in 2023 the average attendance was down again to 3,188.
The average attendance at race meetings in Ireland has fallen by almost 60% in just 20 years.
The early 2000s were of course the Celtic Tiger years and in 2005 the total attendance for the 7 days at Galway Races reached its peak of 210,000 with a massive 55,598 turning up for the Galway Hurdle on the Thursday of that year.
Last year, after a difficult few years, there were green shoots at Galway with the crowds up 5,642 over the 7 days compared to 2022, but even these improved numbers are a far cry from twenty years ago. In 2023 a total of 122,365 people attended across the week, with the biggest daily crowd of 25,924 on the Thursday. Still only half the numbers we saw two decades ago.
When you see the crowds that turn up for other sporting events and concerts around the country it’s hard to solely blame economic factors on falling attendances for race meetings.
People still have disposable income, but for whatever reasons are not as inclined to spend it on horse racing as they once were and the industry needs to get to the bottom of why that is the case.
Maybe HRI resources would be better spent solving that conundrum than peddling dubious figures about the social and economic impact of the industry.
