SHE MOVES THROUGH THE GLOOM:FOALS WERE the real babies of the boom, cute but expensive. They were bred more indiscriminately than they ever had been before. They were a novelty to many of their owners. And now, suddenly, we have too many of them. Or you could say that foals and horses were like houses in the boom: something irresistible to the newly-prosperous Irish.
“Horse prices and house prices mirror each other pretty closely,” said one horse expert. “We’ve seen downturns before, but we’ve never seen numbers like this. Within the thoroughbred industry it can’t get any worse, pricewise. Sport horses are half of what they were a year ago. I was at sales in the autumn where they didn’t even put foals in the ring.”
Horses look good all the time, even as their owners fret around them. But on a freezing winter day, as the steam rises from their nostrils and their sweet smell is mixed with the chilly fog, you can see quite clearly why people love horses, and consider them a luxury worth paying for.
Lot 17, a pretty brown pony, is being ridden round the indoor arena by a young girl. “Keep the hands soft,” warns the owner of Lot 17. The rider Lowri McGinn is also getting instructions from her aunt, Louise Pengelly, both of whom are from Wales. It is hard to know which adult is looking more fondly at the sight of Lowri on the pretty brown pony.
“She’s the result of an unplanned pregnancy between a horse and a very small pony,” says the owner of Lot 17. He has plenty more horses at home. And Lot 17 herself will be going home with him. She is withdrawn at €1,000.
Lowri and Louise buy two horses here today, for their trekking centre in Wales.
“Horses are a luxury item,” says one woman who has been in the industry for years. “The old rich bend over backwards to keep them. But for other people you need a high salary to keep a horse for €150-€200 a week. Even if you’re a farmer it’s €60 for a set of shoes, then there is the price of feed and transport costs.”
This is the last horse sale of 2008 at Donohoe’s sales in Goresbridge, Co Kilkenny. There will not be another until February 7th. There are no racehorses here. These are the ponies and the sport horses, the ordinary horses of Ireland, if you will, which are on sale in a cold climate. To an outsider, the horse owners here are a strange mixture of calm ruthlessness and high emotion.
“She wouldn’t conceive! She wouldn’t conceive!” says one elderly seller from Tipperary. “And another thing about her is, she’s a bit of a boss. She’d have plenty to eat, but she resents the others.”
He does not seem to like this mare – “She looks like she’s on foal at the minute, but she’s not.”– on the other hand, perhaps he’s just disgusted with the money he got for her today : €265 for this difficult creature. “Tis a scandalous price, alright,” he says.
Then he launches in to the mare’s gynaecological history, about how he had to pay several covering fees for her to be mated each season. About how she conceived too late in the year.
His whole family is interested in horses, he says. He has three more broodmares in foal at home. He started breeding in 1979 and at one time was getting a couple of thousand euro for his foals.
“But then six or seven hundred euro was the best you could get.” Horses for him have always been a sideline. “I was driving trucks for most of my life.”
Not all of Ireland’s horse breeders had 40 years’ experience behind them when the recession hit. On the contrary. “Farmers were encouraged to diversify,” says one industry observer. “They were buying broodmares and then sucked in to paying big stud fees.
“They took a heck of a hammering this year. They could have paid €2,000 in stud fees and be getting €1,000 for a foal.”
Louise Murphy from Kanturk in Cork is doing her Leaving and is selling her horse so she can concentrate on her studies. “That’s the idea anyway.” She had sold another of her horses previously. But this time the horse doesn’t sell and it has to be driven back to Kanturk, two hours away.
It is surprising just how many horses the individual sellers at Goresbridge have. Horses seem to be addictive. John Kearney, from Armagh, has two horses for sale here today.
“I sold one here last night – €1,400 for a three-year-old filly.” He would not be tempted to buy, even though the prices are so low. “I need the money. I’ve a load of broodmares,12. If I buy I’ll have to file for divorce.”
In the event, neither of John Kearney’s horses in today’s sale, a five-year-old broodmare and a 10- year-old broodmare, sold. He took them back to Armagh and says he might try again next year.
“It can’t be much worse than it is now anyway” he says. He will return to driving his taxi.
“There’s no doubt the market has collapsed,” says an equestrian vet who on no account wanted to be named. Horsey people are united by their communal hatred of publicity, it seems.
“A lot of breeders have sent their mares to the factory. In the good times people started breeding from stock which didn’t have a high enough pedigree. And a lot of people in the industry would have been delighted to charge 60 per cent to 70 per cent too much in covering fees.”
The surfeit in foals is also seen at the top of the market. George Mernagh, managing director of Tattersalls Ireland, agrees that the estimate that the number of bloodstock foals doubled between 2000 and 2008 is close to the mark. “Having said that, our November sale was good. Good colt [that is, male] foals were difficult to buy. Some went for €80,000. Female foals who are not correct, or are by sires which are not in fashion – the market is just saturated with them.”
There are also too many racehorses in training – a fact that is attributed directly to the building boom and the money it generated for the buying of racehorses.
Training is expensive. “It costs €40 a day, at the most basic, run-of-the-mill level” says George Mernagh. There are even too many horses for the races they should be running in. An ordinary maiden hurdle might have 80 entries when only 18 horses are allowed run.
George Mernagh too has seen downturns in the industry before. “I remember ’91 and ’92 were very quiet. But we’ve never seen these numbers before. And it all happened so fast. It’s a global thing.”
In addition to the global recession, and a reduction in prize-money over the past six months which George Mernagh estimates at 8 and 10 per cent, the racing industry also had last summer’s weather to contend with. August and September were very wet months, and many meetings were cancelled.
“But our racing is still very good. Our end product is excellent. In comparison with the UK, it’s attractive to keep horses in Ireland.”
But for many of them the story of Ireland’s boom foals ends at BF Meats near Thomastown, in Co Kilkenny, It is currently slaughtering something close to 100 horses a week.
On the sunny Saturday I visited, two long-haired horses were calmly cropping the grass outside the factory. They didn’t know it, but they were waiting their turn. “This time last year it was maybe 30 horses a week,” says Ted Farrell, the managing director.
Farrell is a sturdy, sensible sort of man who is getting a bit tired of stories in the press about destitute horses being destroyed.
“There are a lot of rumours. It’s like al-Qaeda or something. I’ve heard rumours of waiting lists that were supposed to be six months or three months long. But in fact you’d have to wait just a week to get your horse through here. And we’ve seen no welfare cases.”
BF Meats is the only meat factory in the country which is licensed to kill horses for human consumption. There are murmurs from people in the horse world that another such factory is needed. At BF Meats the horses must have all their paperwork checked by a Department of Agriculture official, and be examined by a Department of Agriculture vet. Most of the resulting meat is exported to the Continent, for the tables of Belgium and France. Some is sent to specialised pet food manufacturers. For your horse BF Meats will currently give you €300. “It was €500, €600 one or two years ago,” Ted Farrell says. None of this cheers him very much, but it’s his job to give horses a humane and closely documented end.
If only their beginnings had been as closely monitored. Back at Goresbridge, the infuriated Tipperary farmer who got €265 for his mare is planning what he will tell his neighbours. He has decided to lie about the price he got for her. “Sure they say it’s no sin to lie about your own business,” he says.
Horse sales: Economic downturn puts a halter on Goresbridge gallop
"In the end this might have a positive effect on prices. When horses get scarce they get dearer again." He has seen the slump coming for a while.
"We saw a change a year ago. We noticed it before all the lark about the downturn."
Martin Donohoe is old enough to remember previous bad times.
"The business has been here for 40 years. The last downturn was in the '80s. I remember that time it was hard to sell horses. It was worse even then than it is now. Now we're probably victims of our own success.
"We have more horses than the market can take. People bred the wrong thing. And those kind of people fall away."
He isn't critical of the people who dabbled in horses, the people who have been burned now by the escalating price of feed, and other costs.
"It's a hobby to make money. I know somebody who plays cards."
Martin's father, Ned Donohoe, founded Goresbridge Horse Sales. He died of a heart attack at the age of 45 when Martin was 15.
His mother Kitty was eight months pregnant with her 10th child when her husband died. She ran the business after his death.
Martin trained as an auctioneer in Dublin and in Tipperary. Another brother, Edmund, is also an auctioneer with his own business in Kilkenny, but he sells horses on sales days in Goresbridge. A third brother, Michael, is a bloodstock dealer.
Martin's children work in the Goresbridge office on auction day. And Ms Donohoe is still working.
During the auction she sits on the auctioneers' platform, reading out the details of each horse and pony.
Three auctioneers handle the bidding in shifts, and Ms Donohoe works with each one of them in turn. There is a sort of permanence about her. "We're at the lower end of an ebb," says Martin Donohoe.
The first sale of the new year takes place at Goresbridge this coming weekend.