Jackie Cahill (Tipperary, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I also want to raise the issue of point-to-point racing with the Minister. That industry is at a critical juncture. This is regarded as an amateur sport, but a significant amount of money is involved. The cornerstone of the National Hunt industry is point-to-point racing. Many small operators have considerable investment in bloodstock and point-to-point racing is their shop window to sell their horses. The people involved are professional trainers even though they are amateur in name.

All these horses are sold between February and the middle of May. They need to be able to run them to have the shop window to sell these horses. The only way they can get them sold is by running them in point-to-point races to show what they are capable of doing. At the moment there are extra entries into races at racecourses organised by Horse Racing Ireland, HRI. Point-to-point trainers are doing that out of desperation. That is not the window they need to sell their horses. What they need is to have their horses jumping over a three-mile course to show their potential. If these trainers are not able to sell these horses this spring, the customers will not be there to buy three-year-old horses in the sales next summer.

That will feed down into the yearling and foal sales next autumn so everyone in the breeding chain will be severely affected. It will have a huge impact on our national hunt breeding, from which it might not recover. People are ringing me every day who are under extreme financial pressure. They have heavy financial commitments based on the possible sale of these horses. While they obviously did not know what the horses would make, they knew they would sell them in the window between 1 February and the middle of May. HRI has run horse racing perfectly within all the health guidelines. Thankfully there have been no clusters at any of the race meetings it has had, and there have been three or four a week. When point-to-point racing was running last November and December we had no clusters either. I am confident that, with the proper protocols in place, the same will be true again. I urge the Minister, for the sake of the industry and for these small men who are involved in national hunt breeding, to give consideration to allowing point-to-point racing to restart when making recommendations for 5 March. It is hugely financially important and it is the small man in the industry who will suffer.

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