FROM THE ARCHIVES:The Free State's seventh budget in 1929 changed little and missed the opportunity to remove the tax on racecourse betting, which The Irish Timesthought was a major mistake. – JOE JOYCE
CHIEF AMONG the disappointments of Mr. Blythe’s Budget is his refusal to abolish the tax on race-course betting. This refusal would give us small concern if it affected only the pockets of the betting community, but the matter has a far more serious aspect.
In his evidence before the Free State Joint Committee on Betting, Captain G. Martin employed a striking and true phrase: he said that racing was the horse-breeder’s “shop window.” Prosperous racing is indispensable to prosperous horse breeding because the horse’s merits are tested on the race-course.
Nobody, not even the sternest Puritan, questions the importance of Ireland’s horse-breeding industry. More, perhaps, than any other industry, it enriches and advertises the nation. The annual value of its exported bloodstock is placed at 1½ million pounds, and it circulates large sums at home.
In Dáil Éireann yesterday Mr. P. W. Shaw estimated the weekly outlay on the maintenance of racehorses at £5,000. Now this industry in threatened with the loss of its shop window. During the last few years Irish racing has been on the down grade. Stakes are being reduced; attendances are falling; the former profit of the principal racing companies is being turned into a deficit.
Mr. Shaw expressed the views of all breeders, owners and racegoers when he said that reduced stakes were due to shrinking attendances, which, in turn, resulted chiefly from the present tax on race-course betting. Mr. Shaw’s argument is reinforced by the interim report of the Joint Committee on Betting, which we print to-day. The Committee includes unprejudiced economists, and is in no way pledged to the defence of racing interests. On the strength of “convincing evidence”, it finds that the tax is working grave harm to the horse-breeding industry and ought to be withdrawn.
At present, whether we consider the situation economically or morally, he is making the worst of both worlds. Betting on horses is an insuppressible instinct. A wise Government, realising that it cannot be extinguished, would try to control it in such fashion as would put the maximum check on social and moral abuses, and would harness this human weakness to the State’s financial and economic needs.
On the other hand the Free State Government has legalised among the poorer classes an unrestrained system of gambling which does immense harm and benefits no industry. On the other, it penalises those who can afford to bet, and harries Irish racing. The Joint Committee’s final report ought to be followed by immediate legislation for the removal of the tax on race-course betting and for the reform of the betting shops.
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