Gerry Kilfeather

I’m from Strandhill, just beside Knocknarea mountain, and I’ve been coming to Sligo racecourse since I was a child. My father was involved in horses and I used to come racing with him. He used to train at Culleenamore Stables where Mark McNiff is now based. I had my first ride here when I was 17. I always remember it because it was just a few days before the Leaving Cert started and I was far more concerned about getting around in a bumper and not falling off than I was about the Leaving Cert. I was the coolest customer ever going into a Leaving Cert, I’d say!

My dad trained for a variety of people including local businessman Seamus Maye. I was based with him and, at first, rode as an amateur for a couple of years. Then I turned professional and in all I rode 49 winners in my career. I didn’t break many records but I didn’t break many teeth either, I’d a charmed enough existence and I enjoyed it very much. I had one or two rides on the Flat but I was too heavy for that so it was pretty much jumping all the way for me.

My association with the Durkan family started when I went to work for Martin Lynch who was renting their yard in Stepaside. After Martin bought his own place in Westmeath, Bill Durkan asked me to come on board as he was getting back into racing at that stage although he was very busy with it being the middle of the building boom. We started off with one or two horses and a descendant of his Arkle winner Anaglogs Daughter was the first one we had. We’d great fun with her, I won five races on her and I also trained for Bill. I was with him for about 13 or 14 years and we’d a great relationship. I managed his string of horses as well because he would have had maybe 30 or 40 horses in training with other people at that time and I would keep an eye on them for him. He had the likes of Miss Beabea and her daughter Miss Beatrix who won the Moyglare and the inaugural running of the Goffs Million. That was an incredible time. I can remember Bill sending me down to the Curragh on the Monday to pick up the over-sized cheque. He wanted it for the wall! I never wanted to be stopped by the guards as much, with a million pound cheque, eight foot by three, in the back of the jeep! He was a super man for Irish racing, still rides his hunters now in his eighties, and I still keep in touch with him and his family who are as good a family as you’d ever meet.

Towards the end of the building boom, Bill cut back on the number of horses he had and I always had an inkling to come back to Sligo. We came back here about ten years ago and that was my reconnection with Sligo races. My father would have been on the original committee so there was a link there and I was invited to join the board of directors of the track under manager Kathryn Foley. I'm currently vice-chairman.

Racing in Sligo was originally held in Rosses Point and later at Hazelwood near Lough Gill. There's some great pictures of horses and carriages going out to the previous venue at Hazelwood with all the glamour and the finery, it had a Royal Ascot feel to it. We have our Ladies Day on the 10th of July this year, and people think these events are a relatively new phenomenon, but when you see those old photographs you realise that back in the day they could put out the style too. When racing finished at Hazelwood, there was some uncertainty about the future of racing in Sligo before a new site was approved at Cleveragh. There was a great crowd of around 7,000 people when the first meeting was held here in August 1955.

We've evolved over the years and are well situated now at the present track. There was talk about closing smaller tracks years ago and we are an outpost, we realise that, but we have to make the best of it. So we try to provide the best ground we can and the best facilities we can with the monies we have available to us.

We did a big drainage job on the track four or five years ago and it has been fantastic, it has changed the track dramatically. We can race for a much longer season than previously and that's going to help us in our aim to extend our season, with hopefully another meeting added in due course which is what we would like to do. In the past we would have struggled with our last, and sometimes our first, meeting of the season because it would be so soft. But since the drainage work, we haven't had heavy in the description since I don't know when, or firm in the description since I don't know when, and we try to keep a happy medium.

There are capital grants available at the moment so we've put in an application to extend our stableyard so that we can have more runners. Each horse now has to have its own stable, the days of sharing stables are gone, and if you have 120 runners you have to have 120 stables. We have 89 boxes at the moment and the aim is to get that up to somewhere around 110. That's next on the agenda, and further down the road we're hoping to put in a lagoon so that we'll have our own source of water for watering the track.

Things have come full full circle for me in that I'm now back riding work five mornings a week at Mark McNiff's yard in Culleenamore. That keeps me in touch with the game and keeps me half-fit. I played Gaelic football for Coolera-Strandhill in the past and was captain of the senior team for a couple of years. I was an annoying half-back! I've been involved in coaching there for the last few years. A couple of my kids play with the club now including my son who's just finished his Leaving Cert and my daughter. She's on the under-16 girls' team and I'm coaching that team at the moment.