A rare sight from Listowel last June when 4 out of 5 riders in a race were female© Photo Healy Racing
Many within racing have been quick to dismiss TD Clare Daly's Dail declarations about the industry containing wholesale illegality as simply a leftie rant by another disaffected Trot. Some of them are probably also bemoaning how difficult it is to get good staff. They seem either unwilling or unable to make the link between that and how much staff get paid and how they're treated. That has got rather lost in all this.
Those of us who trade in language know that sometimes the desire to make a point can backfire. Daly painted a wild west picture of "vicious exploitation, wholesale and deliberate illegality, ruthless vested interests and criminal behaviour without any oversight or regulation." She also described stable staff as "indentured slaves" seemingly in a overegged attempt to highlight their plight fighting The Man. So the language became the story rather than the real story which is actually relatively mundane.
Admirable attempts to set up a non-contributory pension scheme for stable staff initially led to a pitifully low uptake by trainers to update the Turf Club with details of staff income. When the €25,000 threshold was halved , uptake increased. Daly, it seems, has taken this as evidence of a thriving black market in 'cash-in-hand' payments by trainers taking advantage of oppressed staff and in the process fiddling the taxman as needy people are deprived of basic employment and pension entitlements.
Except you have to exist in a very cosy incubator not to realise 'cash-in-hand' works both ways. It is a very upright tradesman who won't even consider swapping a 100 quid cheque, including vat, for eighty quid cash. So presumably not everyone prepared to ride out in the wind and rain every morning has their obligations to revenue at the forefront of their minds. It's not dissimilar in fact to many more prosperous pillars of the community with a similarly ambivalent view to paying tax on incomes which are a damn sight larger than those doing 'nixers' in horse yards.
Technically such shades of grey shouldn't happen. In a Scandinavian society the aspiration towards a black and white tax system, whether you're PAYE or self-employed, may produce gratifying egalitarian results. But this is Ireland. And if in Sweden the PAYE payer knows his self-employed next door neighbour is coughing the same as he is, here you KNOW they're not. Where's the proof, you ask: and of course there isn't any: but still, you KNOW.
Usually it's Daly's preparedness to articulate such realities that make her a valuable voice in public discourse as a whole. If it can strike some as too 'right-on' sometimes then that's hardly damning considering so much in political life is such a write-off.
She helped jolt some smug assumptions during the furore over the process of Brian Kavanagh's reappointment as HRI's chief executive and if the end result has been no change then it did no harm to pinprick the torrent of civil servant officialise with some cold reality. Certainly her readiness to call the rich and powerful to account is laudable in a country where craven expediency is much more normal.
But characterising stable staff as indentured slaves is OTT, unreflective for one of how 'cash-in-hand' works both ways. And while it may be illegal, there are far worse lawbreakers who are both figuratively and literally dealing under the counter and playing fast and loose with Revenue obligations for a lot more than those riding out every morning are getting. It might be worth Daly's while concentrating her ire on them. She might not have to aim too far away either.
As for racing's own famously conservative entrepreneurial pillars, the days of indentured slaves might be gone but treating employees properly and with dignity will never be outdated.
Many behave admirably but for others, expecting people, and especially young idealistic people, to work for a pittance is as offside as pretending a pension is some sort of luxury. Maybe the Workplace Relations Commission can remind some people of that when they come a calling as part of any multi-agency "swoop." That is if they can be spared from swooping on those who are really taking the state for a ride.
It's a year since the Anti-Doping Task Force report came out. It's five years since 6kg of the anabolic steroid Nitrotain was intercepted going through Dublin airport on route to the disgraced retired Department of Agriculture veterinary inspector, John Hughes.
Also in 2012 an anabolic steroid was found at the training yard of Hughes's brother, Pat, and 1kg of Nitrotain was discovered in a raid on Philip Fenton's stables. The Task Force was racing's official response to scandals which had major implications for the credibility of the Irish bloodstock industry as a whole.
Central to the report was that horses had to be traceable throughout their lives in terms of testing. The Task Force recommended protocols be set up between the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders Association and the Turf Club which would allow the regulatory body test on stud farms. This was a matter of urgency, a chance to allow an industry protect its reputation, something it's logical to assume is in the self-interest of that industry.
And it's so urgent that discussions between the ITBA and the Turf Club are still "ongoing," including, apparently, in relation to the issue of how much notice breeders should get before tests are carried out. The ITBA first wanted seven days notice. Now it's cut that down to five. And people are supposed to look at that and believe the bloodstock industry is serious about anti-doping.
The idea of drug-testers giving any sort of notice about when they're coming is as ludicrous as one of the reasons such notice is supposedly required - to catch stock. What kind of crazes are running around paddocks that need five days to be caught?
Maybe it's all just a negotiating platform from a conservative sector resistant to change but it comes across as ridiculous and reflective of an industry dragging its feet on introducing an element of transparency that is surely in its long term reputational interest. So why is it happening and why is it being allowed to happen?
And finally, unpredictability is famously a very French thing and France Galop certainly caught everyone on the hop with their 4.5lb (2kg) allowance initiative for female riders. The Turf Club says there are no plans for a similar move here and even if is considered sometime the Irish Jockeys Association has pondered whether it might be discriminatory. To which some will undoubtedly argue it is indeed discrimination, but of the positive kind.
