Shelbourne Off Sat 4th + 11th

there may well be less tracks to picket come march

Eamonn Sweeney has wriiten this in todays Sunday Independent
THE announcement by the Irish Greyhound Board of the closure and planned sale of the stadium in Harold’s Cross has provoked an angry response. The Dublin Greyhound Owners and Breeders’ Association’s planned picket of Shelbourne Park prompted the IGB to cancel not just race meetings at the stadium but the annual Irish Greyhound Awards. DGOBA secretary Mick O’Keefe accused the IGB of “seeking to destroy a deeply-valued part of Dublin life”.
Acting board CEO Dr Sean Brady describes the proposed sale as “unavoidable” and “absolutely essential”, and a 2014 government-commissioned report on the industry did recommend that Harold’s Cross (inset) be sold to help the IGB get out of debt. But Harold’s Cross is paying the price for the board’s past mistakes. The anger felt by many has to do not just with the closure but with the fact that it comes after an utterly disastrous decade for the sport.
The saddest thing is that the previous decade was a golden era for greyhound racing in the same way that the ’80s was for Irish basketball.
In 2005 the sport was enjoying its highest attendance figures since the late ’70s. In 1995 the total attendance had been just 580,000, by 2005 it was 1.39 million. That decade saw betting revenue increase by almost 500 per cent and prize money increase eleven-fold. Greyhound racing had apparently managed to reinvent itself for a new Ireland. The corporate trip to the dogs was a signal outing of the Tiger era. The opening of a magnificent new stadium in Cork summed up the bullish mood of renewed confidence.
Little over a decade later it is as though all the progress made in those years has been set at naught. By 2014 attendance had fallen to 644,000, and betting on the tote — which at its height challenged that of horse racing — had fallen from €51m to €11m. To make matters worse, the IGB found itself saddled with debt as a plan to repeat the success of Cork by building a new stadium in Limerick misfired. There were cost over-runs on the project and its eventual cost of €21m bears a striking resemblance to the board’s current debt of €20.3m.
The board had expected Limerick to be a success, earning 85 per cent of the profits realised in Cork. Instead it has been a loss-making enterprise and a millstone around the sport’s neck. The decision to build it was greyhound racing’s equivalent of the bank guarantee. A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General found that the board hadn’t done their homework properly when deciding to build the new stadium in Limerick. What must surely rankle with Dublin greyhound people is that Harold’s Cross does turn a profit but will be sacrificed to pay for the failings of the white elephant beside the Shannon.
Greyhound racing undoubtedly suffered because of the crash but has been unable to recover ground in the same way that horse racing has done. Chairman during the boom years, Paschal Taggart, stepped down in 2006 after a Government report criticised the board’s firing of CEO Aidan Tynan, who had been unhappy with what he felt was the IGB’s lenient attitude towards doping offences. It was an unsavoury affair but Taggart’s dynamism has been a loss to the sport.
The impression of a sport in crisis isn’t just confined to the attendance figures. Doping continues to be a problem. The Morris Report, commissioned by the IGB itself, found “significant deficiencies in Irish anti-doping and medication control policies. It found the national greyhound laboratory doesn’t have the facilities to detect important medications and doping agents at the levels required for effective anti-doping and medication control”. A series of critical reports on RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime led to more unwelcome headlines. In December CEO Geraldine Larkin resigned. The Harold’s Cross closure put the tin hat on another annus horribilis.
Greyhound racing deserves better. It is, after all, not just a sport but an industry which in 2010 was estimated to employ over 10,000 people. Though that figure may have dropped since then the current parlous state of the game is more than just a sporting problem.
There is nothing inevitable about greyhound racing’s decline. Things were this bad 20 years ago when, interestingly enough, it was also proposed to sell Harold’s Cross before the minister responsible, Jimmy Deenihan, forced a U-turn. The current minister, Andrew Doyle, describes the sport as “part of the fabric of the Irish sporting scene”, which “provides significant public good, both as a social outlet and as a provider of vital employment, especially in rural areas”.
These are fine words, but greyhound racing needs the politicians to show some leadership as well. A decade of drift has left this great sport in dire straits. Another 10 years like this might finish it off altogether.

they will picket tonigh tuesday , friday and Saturday again at this stage

thursday there will be no picket so will race

Deleted User wrote: »

Try ringing IGB.

they will say there racing tonight friday and saturday , but they prob wont be