Mr. Barry O'Connor:

I thank the committee for the invitation to make a presentation. We appreciate members' time and interest. I will summarise my opening statement due to time constraints. I am sure everybody wants to get on with their evening. I am a producer, seller and trainer of showjumping horses. I am based in Malahide, County Dublin, and have a stable of 20 horses. I have eight staff. I mentor young riders. I have lectured at NUI Maynooth on occasion. I run training programmes for Teagasc young breeders and the Showjumping Association of Ireland.

I am accompanied by Mr. Greg Broderick from Tipperary. He is an Olympian and a breeder and producer of horses. I am also joined by Mr. Ger O'Neill from Kilkenny. He is also a breeder and producer. He produced and rode two of the gold medal winners at the recent world championships for young horses in Lanaken, Belgium. I am also accompanied by Mr. Jim Power, whom I believe is well known to members.

The Irish Sport Horse Alliance is a voluntary body comprising a group of businesses, individuals and sports bodies directly involved in the sports horse industry. The sport horse is anything other than a thoroughbred. The sector is driven mainly by eventing, showjumping and dressage - mainly by the Olympic disciplines. That is where most of the professional economic activity is.

Our group represents 3,000 jobs because our members include breeders, producers, trainers, owners, vets, blacksmiths, feed companies and equipment companies. Most of the major companies in Ireland are members and contributors to our alliance. Our goal is to sustain an increase in jobs, exports and inward investment in the sector and to grow the sector. We believe there is potential to double our output in jobs, exports and inward investment. We are not here to look for any subsidies, price supports or tax breaks. We will look after the price of our product. We just want investment from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

We are here to present our report. When we came together as a body two years ago, we found there were numerous reports on our industry, amounting to four or five over the past 15 years, but none had definitive information on the contribution of the sport horse sector or, indeed, its potential. Therefore, we commissioned Mr. Jim Power to produce an economic report on our industry. It has been circulated among members and he will elaborate on it. His remit was to inform public policy-makers of the economic footprint of the sector and identify measures that can be taken to unlock its potential.

The stand-out point in the report is that the industry is worth €816 million to the Exchequer and employs 14,000 plus. We did not make up those figures. They come from a UCD report, which was commissioned independently. They are not from any sport or breeding body or from us. They are altogether independent of our group. Another stand-out point in the report is that each horse results in average expenditure of €7,000 per year in the local economy. I refer to expenditure through vets, blacksmiths, feed, forage, bedding, subscriptions, travel, equipment and training. The report also states there are 20,000 active sport horses in Ireland, which means €140 million invested in the rural economy. That is outside the M50 in all the rural constituencies from Dingle to Donegal. In my stable alone – I am based in County Dublin – the feed comes from Kilkenny and the bedding from Ballina. My vet is from Kildare and my blacksmith is from Meath. I do shows around the country and my hay and any straw I use come from County Carlow. Those in the industry spend right around the country, benefitting every village and rural area.

There is a lot of good news in our sector. We are not here to complain and whine. In the past 18 months in the sport alone, we became the European senior gold medal winners. This happened in Sweden. At the world championships in Atlanta, America, this year, we were the silver team medal eventers. We had an individual silver there. We were the gold medal individual winners at the under-14 and under-18 competitions in Fontainebleau in France, with one competitor riding Mr. Ger O'Neill's horses. We are second in the world breeding statistics for eventing horses. Therefore, our island produces the second best eventing horses for export all around the world. We won three medals this year at the world breeding championships for young horses in Lanaken, Belgium. This is against all the other breeds from areas that are way stronger than us in terms of investment and numbers.

In our report, we envisage that we need €100 million in investment over the next five years to sustain our employment level, double it and increase our worth to the Exchequer. As a group of businesspeople, we realise the realties of budgetary allocations owing to a series of competing demands. I have watched a few of the reviews of people coming in here giving presentations and I realise everybody is looking for money at the same time.

Brexit will have a serious effect on the lower end of our market because England takes approximately 40% of our exports. The movement of horses is worrying for us because any slowdown in the movement of horses is where much of the expense arises. If the product is easier to get in Europe, those concerned will get it there instead.

We ask for €100 million as a group over five years. That is the figure we produced in the Jim Power report. Horse Sport Ireland put in a budget submission to the Government asking for €30 million. It wanted to spend it over the four new departments: high-performance sports; sports and recreation; breeding and production; and coaching, education and training. Unfortunately, in the budget we got an extra €500,000, which brings our annual funding from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to €3 million.

That is completely inadequate. I do not know how people think we can sustain 14,000 jobs and grow the economy with that level of funding. I cannot see the thinking behind it at all. That is one of the requests we have today. If our potential is to be realised, it is critical that realistic multi-annual funding is established so that we are not coming back every year and wondering what we are going to do next year, what programmes we can open and can sustain and what we can do over the next couple of years.

We have written to the Minister, Deputy Creed, to ask him to establish a high-level group to identify and secure sustainable funding streams for our sector. Without such an initiative the sector will have a high level of ambition, but no growth. With the committee's permission, my colleagues will now give a brief synopsis of what they do.