Eugene Murphy (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and his officials. I welcome the money for horse racing. I will not go into greyhound racing. I come from County Roscommon, and we have a racetrack there. Between April and October we have meetings. It is such an important part of the local economy. We should never lose sight of that fact. We talk about budgets and the amount of money. I think Deputy Fitzmaurice or somebody else has mentioned that we have 30,000 people employed in this industry. There are 26 racecourses, so there are 26 little businesses running from March and April right up to October and November every year. If that were not to be supported, or if it were not in a pretty healthy state, the parts of rural Ireland where they have those racecourses would be an awful lot worse off. It is a huge benefit to the local economy. You will hear this if you could talk to somebody in a filling station or a restaurant in Roscommon, Kilbeggan, Ballinrobe or Galway. Deputy Fitzmaurice and Senator Daly would know about this. Those racing events, dates and festivals are really important to local employment and the local economy. I was looking back on the history of County Roscommon. As far as I know, and I stand to be corrected, many of those racecourses are there since 1840 - approximately 180 years. It is a sport that was loved. It is also important to note that people want good standards. They want everything to be above board. Irish people enjoy racing quite a lot. It is an important sport, in particular for rural Ireland.

I will turn to funding. Considerable work has been done in Roscommon in recent years. I presume all of that comes out of a budget like this. Racecourses do not qualify for lottery sports grants or anything like that. Is all of the work being done funded by what is allocated to them out of this budget?

I will also say something about prize money. I like a bit of racing myself, and I think our race prize money is quite generous in this country. There is quite a lot of money for a number of races. However, the important point for me with horse racing is that it is a business with 30,000 jobs, which for most of the year benefits the local economy. It is really important we look after that, apart from the horse breeding and exporting in that area, which is really important. I just have that question on the fund raising.