Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Yes. I am opposed to giving €95 million of public money to the horse and greyhound racing industry. Compare it with the €15 million total in core funding for sports organisations in this country, including the FAI, the GAA, Swim Ireland, the Olympic Federation of Ireland and many others. It is a scandal. There is a lot I could say about the fact that much of this money for horse racing ends up in the pockets of the richest people in this country or about the more than 6,000 greyhounds killed annually because they do not run fast enough.

Instead, this year, I want to focus on deconstructing this report by Jim Power Economics, which is so often relied upon to say this cruelty is okay because it is a very important part of the economy. The key sentence in this report is the very last sentence, "The information and data upon which the report is based was provided by Greyhound Racing Ireland." In other words, Jim Power did not go and check any of the assumptions or the data he was provided with.

Raymond O'Hanlon of Preferred Results has done some work on deconstructing this report and digging under the figures to show the massive exaggerations that are contained within the Power report. Raymond O'Hanlon's work will be online for anyone to peruse and I will cite some key aspects of it. He sums up the approach of the Jim Power report as, "Maximise dog numbers, multiply them by extraordinary costings to generate incredible figures for economic activity, which the vast majority of people do not have the time and/or the knowledge to refute." He refers to headline figures calculated in the Power report. One of them is that:

The weighted average cost for a dog exported to the UK [of all the costs that go into that] comes to approximately €7,683. [The conclusion would be that] ... in order for an owner to breakeven on the sale of a dog to the UK, becoming one of [these] ... 6,500 greyhounds which GRI claims to be exported annually, the average dog would have to sell for [that amount] €7,683.

What do greyhounds actually sell for? The Cork greyhound sales report published on 17 July 2021, around the same time as the publication of the Power report, stated the average sales price was €1,078. What is happening? Are people raising greyhounds for a loss? That would not make any sense. It suggests that the costings apportioned by the GRI for the rearing of greyhounds are approximately seven times higher than in reality. It would mean that the figure of almost €120 million used as the annual spend by greyhound owners is a completely unsound figure.

Another point is that the Power report presents the racing career of a greyhound as being 24 months. The true figure, again coming from the GRI's own figures, is actually 9.6 months. Many of them are then exported to the UK, where they race until they are 72 months old and beyond. The same is the case in terms of the exaggerated figures of numbers of people employed or directly economically benefiting, which is not defined in the report.

What emerges is a story of the public in Ireland subsidising the British greyhound racing industry, supplying more than 85% of the greyhounds that are raced there. I am opposed to this funding on animal welfare and animal rights grounds, I am also opposed because it is a waste of public money.

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