‘An industry in slow and sustained decline’: Greyhound racing facing up to tough questions

Detailed summary

Amid allegations of fraud, falling attendances and issues with animal welfare, sport still retains a political safety net ...

On Thursday, Tim Lucey, the chief executive of Greyhound Racing Ireland, appeared before the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC). For the guts of three hours he fielded pointed questions, none of which came out of the blue. He would have expected a grilling on the sport’s welfare record, its falling attendances, its right to more than €20 million of State funding and the continuing Garda investigation into fraud at three of its tracks. On the alleged fraud, he couldn’t comment.

Greyhound racing spends most of its time out of sight and out of mind and it is never good news that brings it to the public’s attention. But just a month after greyhound racing was one of the big winners in the budget, a detailed report from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) raised serious questions about the State’s continued support for the industry. The PAC was never going to turn a blind eye.

“The current evidence base suggests an industry in slow and sustained decline,” it said in the report. “Is State intervention simply arresting the inevitable collapse of this sector?”

On Thursday, in their allotted question time, every deputy returned to the same subjects. Ever since the scathing Prime Time Investigates programme on the industry in 2019, the mortality rate of racing greyhounds after they retire from the track has been under periodic scrutiny in the Dáil and in the media.

In response to that RTÉ investigation, and the outcry that followed, Greyhound Racing Ireland introduced a tracking system for every racing greyhound in their jurisdiction – a number that runs to 67,000 now since the system was launched five years ago. They also ramped up their welfare checks out of competition and invested more heavily in the rehoming of dogs once their career at the track had finished.

And yet, the numbers still don’t add up. The committee heard that 8,414 of the 12,766 dogs born between 2021 and 2024 had been reported dead on Greyhound Ireland’s traceability system.

“Why are dogs dying at such…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from The Irish Times. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.