How Ireland dominated the Cheltenham Festival...

To The Times

It was “one of the great Gold Cups”, said Greg Wood in The Guardian. In Cheltenham last Friday, Native River and Might Bite “fought a private battle”. While the other runners trailed behind, each horse “dared the other to make a mistake or give some ground”. Finally, after clearing the last jumps, Native River “found the strength to see off his rival”. Riding the horse, Richard Johnson’s timing and judgement were “flawless”. In jump racing’s most prestigious race, he produced a ride “equal to the occasion”. Johnson has waited a long time for this victory, said Paul Hayward in The Daily Telegraph. Eighteen years have passed since his previous Gold Cup triumph. Fortunately, the 40-year-old English jockey is a “patient sort”. For two decades, he had to play second fiddle to A.P. Mccoy: when Mccoy won the jockeys’ championship 20 years in a row, he finished runner-up 16 times. Now, three years after his great rival’s retirement, Johnson “dominates the profession”.

Native River’s win “allowed the British to leave the festival with some respectability”, said Marcus Townend in the Daily Mail. Horses trained in Britain claimed the “holy trinity of prizes”: the Gold Cup, the Champion Hurdle and the Champion Chase. Overall, however, it was a dismal week for the British: they were “thrashed” by the Irish, who had 17 winners to Britain’s 11. Ireland is “a horse-mad country”, said Danielle Rossingh on Cnn.com. With 50 thoroughbred horses for every 10,000 people – ten times more than Britain – “it punches well above its weight”. Yet it hasn’t always thrived at Cheltenham: in 1989, there wasn’t a single Irish-trained winner. This so concerned the festival’s organisers that they went out of their way to accommodate the Irish – by adapting the track, for instance. Britain had tougher rules than Ireland over how often the whip could be used, so Irish jockeys risked being penalised at Cheltenham; to make that less likely, the final fence was moved closer to the finish line.

Thanks in part to such efforts, Irish fortunes at Cheltenham have improved dramatically over the past two decades, said Greg Wood. In 2006, the total number of Irish winners hit double figures for the first time; last year, it reached a record 19. And the key factor in that success is money. So much of the cash in jumping is being “invested and reinvested” in Ireland – particularly by Michael O’leary, the Ryanair tycoon. As a result, the country acquires “the lion’s share of the best jumping prospects”, which makes its dominance at Cheltenham all but inevitable. Until British jumping finds “a billionaire or two” who can compete with O’leary’s largesse, “Ireland’s pre-eminence at the festival is likely to endure”.

Brexit certainly raises problems in relation to Ireland, because the Good Friday Agreement assumed that both parts of the island would remain in the EU. But the agreement does state unequivocally that Northern Ireland remains part of the UK unless and until a majority in the province decides otherwise. It is hardly consistent with the spirit of that agreement to propose, as apparently the EU’S draft text of the withdrawal treaty does, that a post-brexit customs border be created in the Irish Sea, so that one part of the UK remains in the customs union while the rest is outside. One consequence would be that Northern Ireland, bound by the EU’S common external tariff, could not be included in UK trade agreements with third countries.

The proposal could confirm Unionist fears that the EU, and even some in the Republic, seeks to use Brexit to undermine the constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the UK. It will not, therefore, benefit relations between the two communities in Northern Ireland or

between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Were the EU or the Irish government to seek to block negotiations unless the EU’S draft text is agreed, the UK might have to leave the EU without a deal, an outcome that would be as damaging to the Republic as it would to the UK. From this point of view, the interests of the two countries are fundamentally the same. Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government, KCL