Dermot Weld will scourge the bookies, who'll make a fortune from the mob. No change at the Galway races then, writes Frank McNally
The legend of the Galway Races has long been enshrined in the traditional song of the same name. Its writer sets the action on "the 17th of August," and among his claims about the event at Ballybrit are:
There were half a million people there of all denominations,
The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew, and Presbyterian,
There was yet no animosity no matter what persuasion,
But fáilte hospitality inducing fresh acquaintance,
With me whack fol the do fol the diddle idle day.
Clearly, a more up-to-date picture was needed: for one thing, race-week usually starts in late July, and has done so for years. So, in the manner now traditional, the festival organisers commissioned the Michael Smurfit Business School at UCD to carry out an assessment of the week's value, based on last year's event.
It turns out that the estimate of half a million people attending was way off. It might seem like that on Wednesday and Thursday, the days of the Galway Plate and Hurdle, but in fact the number of customers paying in during the entire seven days of the 2002 festival is more like 180,000.
In other respects, however, the old song is spot on. The Smurfit study didn't do a religious break-down of those attending the modern event, but the bit about the "fáilte hospitality" still seems to be true, and with good reason.
According to the study, last year's races were worth €58 million to the local economy. Only €11 million of this was spent inside the racecourse. Another €27 million went to the hotels, restaurants, pubs, and so on. But when the full economic impact is taken into account, the value of the festival to Galway city and county snowballs towards €60 million.
Nowadays, the crowds come from even further afield than they did in the song, which has the train station crammed with "passengers from Limerick, and passengers from Nenagh, the boys of Connemara, and the Clare unmarried maidens".
But the UCD study merely notes that two-thirds come from outside Galway specifically for the event. In a socio-economic breakdown it adds that 65 per cent are between 18 and 34; 63 per cent are single (that would include the Clare unmarried maidens); 65 per cent are male and 42 per cent are professionals.
The train station still carries many of them, but BMWs and Land Rovers are a big feature of the modern festival, as are helicopters; despite steep fares, the helicopter pad at Ballybrit on Thursday evening will look like the evacuation of Saigon.
The fáilte hospitality from local businesses is rivalled only by that of the bookmakers. With big fields in every race and large numbers of once-a-year punters armed only with naivety, Galway is the annual fund-raiser for the bookies' retirement fund. Figures are hard to come by, but the biggest risk for layers is being too greedy.
As one of the betting industry's young Turks, Jason Carty, told the Racing Post this week: "They go there with expectations that they're going to make 100 grand, or at least enough to keep them going through the winter. But they put themselves under pressure by doing that."
Other pitfalls for the turf accountant include Dermot Weld's phenomenal record at Galway, especially in the maiden events. It's not the Clare maidens that bookies worry about, it's the ones from Weld's yard in Kildare. Even so, no bookmaker would claim with a straight face that Galway is anything other than profitable.
Galway's boast of being Europe's biggest racing festival might be contested by Cheltenham. The English festival draws nearly as many customers in its three days as Galway does in seven, and as a betting event, attracts more big-hitters.
Cheltenham is an altogether more aristocratic affair. But the uniqueness of Galway is its atmosphere.
It remains a high-summer celebration of Irishness, a place where most sections of society mingle, yet with no animosity. While locals are more likely now to patronise the evening meetings, leaving Wednesday and Thursday to the throngs of outsiders, the air of easy congeniality for which the races are famous seems to have survived even the boom.
W.B. Yeats could still write as he once did of the Galway race-goers: "Delight makes all of one mind." Speaking of the boom, a reliable barometer of the national mood during the downturn will be the Fianna Fáil tent, the spectacularly successful fund-raising operation that sees the great, the good and several other categories of political patron scrambling to join the Taoiseach and his Ministers for an expensive lunch.
The operation is a favourite target for socialist politicians. But it remains a place where the love of Fianna Fáil dares to speak its name even in the worst of times. The Fianna Fáil tent is a fairly modern tradition; yet it's now an integral part of the event, and if the writer of the Galway Races was updating his song, he would certainly have to include it. The existing version has a line that goes: "It's there you'll see the pipers and the fiddlers competing." Stepping lightly over the issue of fiddle players, it could be argued that Fianna Fáil are the ones with the pipes at the modern Galway Races.
Places in the tent are as much in demand as ever. Even in a slump, the party is still calling the tune, and there's no shortage of people willing to pay the piper.
The Galway Races start on Monday and continue every day until Sunday, August 3rd