Mr. Brian Kavanagh:

We have plenty of national hunt racing ground at the moment. Just to give the history, all-weather racing first came into the UK in the early 1990s. During a very cold winter, there had been no racing for almost two months and the betting shops came to a stand-still. They had jump racing on the all-weather, so they jumped hurdles, and it proved a safety hazard because horses were sliding on landing. It was never run again.

Dundalk had been pursuing us, saying it would like to experiment with jump racing again but, as Senator Daly said, one was not jumping on the all-weather track. It was going to put a grass strip on the back straight and on the finishing straight, on the outside and the inside of that, on which they would have hurdles, so they would switch from all-weather racing on the flat to a strip of three hurdles and go over the jumps.

We concluded that it was not practical because if one were to put on all-weather jump racing, one would either have to fund it as extra fixtures, which was a funding challenge, or one would have to say to other tracks - dare I say tracks like Kilbeggan or Clonmel - that one was taking a fixture away from them and putting it in Dundalk. We felt that was not fair to those tracks. Dundalk would still perhaps have an ambition to explore that further, but we ruled it out at the time. As I said earlier, there is no interest internationally in taking signals from jump racing like that. If a punter or a betting offering in the Far East is going to take Irish racing, they want to know it is on at the same time every week, that it is going to have 12 runners and that it is going be on the flat so it is not a high priority.