Kilbeggan's treatment of staff was reprehensible -

I found this story hard to believe. Paddy Dunican comes across as an arrogant ****hole

Richard Forristal  Racing Post July 20

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Eight years ago David Casey felt compelled to mobilise the rabble-rousing power of Twitter to flag Kilbeggan's excruciating decision to charge jockeys on duty at the track 10c per biscuit.

Judging by the picture he posted – in May 2014 – it looked awfully like a box of Jacob's USA biscuits had been left sitting in a cupboard since Christmas and someone decided to spill them on a plate and cash in. The biscuits were cheap and so was the stunt.

It illustrated an appalling lack of respect for jockeys at a venue that, having been the track at which Kieran Kelly suffered his fatal fall in 2003, should know better than to treat them with such contempt.

Going by the militant action of stable staff last Friday night, Kilbeggan and its manager Paddy Dunican still haven't grasped the notion of looking after those who put on their show for them.

On one of the hottest days of the year, at a venue that requires staff to walk half a mile from the stables to the parade ring – and that's a fraction of the time they spend walking horses before and after they race – Dunican refused to provide free drinking water for grooms who, let's face it, are overworked and underpaid.


"The manager said if they wanted it they could buy it from the canteen," Irish Stable Staff Association chief executive Bernard Caldwell relayed. If that's not Irish racing's 'Let them eat cake' moment, I don't know what is. Darn peasants.

They say society is measured by how it treats its weakest members, and sadly stable staff are at the bottom of the pyramid in racing's little subsection. For them to be treated with such disdain is reprehensible.

Dunican dug his heels in by insisting staff were getting value for money at his discounted rate of €1.50 a bottle. Media rights money doesn't grow on trees and Kilbeggan wasn't going to absorb the cost of hydrating stable staff.

The working assumption is that Irish tracks receive around €50,000 per fixture in TV payments. For argument's sake, let's say Kilbeggan also took around half that sum on the gate based on its standard €15 entry fee, yet still it was deemed unviable to provide water for the busiest people on duty.

Now, as per the special report Mark Boylan compiled this week on the challenging economics the industry is facing right now, we can all appreciate how hard it is for tracks to stay afloat.

Some things, though, are non-negotiable, and it's just basic courtesy to provide adequately for stable staff on a given day.

The saddest thing about all of this is that Dunican had ample opportunity to cut this particular PR disaster off at the pass. He had been invited in to the stewards' room to see if he would relent, but wouldn't budge. Obstinacy in all its resplendent grandeur.

He could probably have filled a clatter of jugs with tap water and ice from the bar and it would have done the job, averting the most senseless bad press, but it wouldn't do to be seen backing down.

To their credit, the staff saw the parsimony for what it was and reciprocated in kind, refusing to leave the stable yard with the runners for the third race until their demand was met.

Their action delayed that race by 22 minutes and there was a decreasing knock-on effect thereafter. More power to them. They took a stand and got the absolute minimum they deserved – an ample supply of drinking water.

Dunican has kept his counsel on the matter since – how do you defend the indefensible? – but this sort of thing needs to be called out and stamped out. That any course would treat stable staff with such shabby disregard is hard to believe. Then again, maybe it's not.

Earlier last week, Caldwell had made a pre-emptive call to warn Killarney that a repeat of the ragged treatment of staff at the track's May fixture – when their canteen amounted to a pop-up space that sounded both slapdash and unhygienic – would be a cause for action.

"They need to cater properly for people who are travelling long distances to be there," Caldwell insisted. "There are people who are travelling with horses for five and six hours who can't stop for food along the way and they need to be provided for properly when they get the horses to the track."


He added: "The message is not getting through as quickly as we would like it to. They keep promising to do things, but we're waiting and waiting and it's not happening. It's not satisfactory."

The Killarney manager Philip O'Brien conceded they had to do better and the staff were satisfied that the track had upped its game for last week's festival, but, again, Caldwell shouldn't have had to go public to provoke a response.

Lest we forget, the late Pat Smullen was compelled to take similar action some years ago when he posted a damning photo of the jockeys' menu at the same track. Even Jack Kennedy, a local, eventually went public with his gripes after he and many other professionals were repeatedly refused access to the car park in Killarney during the July festival in 2018.

Neither Kennedy nor Smullen would have been rocking boats unnecessarily, but sometimes you need to light fires under people.

There have been other culprits too, with Limerick recently being castigated by both staff and owners for failing to provide adequate food and facilities, while the Curragh's treatment of pretty much everyone during its revamp epitomised much of what's wrong with a system that is so skewed by the media rights money hose.

Remember, meeting certain criteria of the media rights contract – such as average field sizes – has triggered aggressive expansion of the fixture list.

This was something Brian Kavanagh confirmed in 2020 during his time as Horse Racing Ireland chief executive, and we've seen a nine per cent hike in fixtures over six years, going from 357 in 2017 to 390 this year. It all adds up to a significant windfall for the tracks, yet still too many of them take stable staff and other members of the workforce for granted. It's not good enough.

With a new media rights deal being negotiated, now might be a good time for HRI to table a clause that requires a sign-off on working conditions at a track before payments take place. That would buck a few ideas up.