'We've literally been frozen out, entitled to nothing...A lot of people have remortgaged houses to stay afloat'

Ring-fenced: Usually thronged throughout the afternoon, the betting rings of Cheltenham will be silenced this year. Photo: Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images

Vincent Hogan Twitter Email

March 16 2021 02:30 AM

Their factory floor has been silent for a calendar year now and, from where they’re standing, nobody cares a whoop.

Time was the worst thing that could happen on-course layers was a favourite committing the sin of coming home first, but they are denied even that pleasure of the gamble now. Already hopelessly diminished by the exchanges, this ancient market is hanging by the slenderest of threads.

Racing came back in the summer but, without people, it came back without the music of the ring.

Most business is phone business now – and betting is no different.

Brian Keenan junior has never had a pitch at Cheltenham but, in a normal year, he’d still have plenty of money riding on the Festival. In the hustle and bustle of their natural environment, the bookie – at least – gets access to passing traffic.

Stuck at home, that’s now escaping them.

“I haven’t missed Cheltenham in ten years,” he says. “Even though we don’t have a pitch there, the whole year is built up around it. Take Honeysuckle, for example. You’d be staggered if you had a camera at my pitch for the Irish Champion Hurdle at Dublin Racing Festival, the amount of people – and I’m not talking about big punters, I’m talking twenties and fifties – who would say, ‘Keep 50 out of that and put it on Honeysuckle for the Champion Hurdle’.

“Like these would be just casual racegoers. And we’ve missed all of that.”

The on-course bookie has always been a part of the tapestry of this kind of week, characters embedded every bit as much in the social milieu as in the din of on-site commerce.

Some of the bigger Irish names in the trade, the Sean Grahams, John Mulhollands and Pat O’Hares have the means to pay for a pitch at Cheltenham and, ordinarily, most of their Festival business would come from familiar faces.

The Irish, historically, prefer gambling with their own.

But in an endlessly supersizing world, the pinch on the traditional bookmaker has been cruelly exacerbated by Covid.

Keenan, whose father – also Brian – was an on-course layer most of his life as well as owner of horses like Sir OJ and Maid From Milan, hasn’t worked a pitch since March 11 of last year at Leopardstown.

“It’s brutal,” he says flatly. “And I suppose the hardest part of it is not knowing when it’s going to end. I know everyone has their troubles these times, but we’re entitled to none of the Government supports that other sectors are getting.

“And naturally, by the nature of our business, you’re not going to get public sympathy anyway.”

That last sentence will resonate with most across his industry, given what Keenan sees as the sense of stigma attached to a profession as old as regulated horse-racing itself.

He recently developed this point in a personal blog, his words energised by the frustration of sensing a profession being almost casually demonised.

“I think a prostitute would get a better reception than a bookmaker and I’m not trying to be funny when I say that,” he wrote. “You should see what it’s like trying to get a mortgage when you tell the bank manager you’re a bookmaker. Society will judge, before they even know the facts.

“They don’t see the human side. I’ve dealt with people with gambling problems, I’ve stopped them betting with me before the term self-exclusion became fashionable.

“I do it because deep down I don’t want anybody losing money they can’t afford to lose. Punters are spoken about as if they are some form of degenerates or that their recreational activity should be shunned. It’s a view held by many non-gamblers but it’s an incorrect view. Most people who gamble do so for a bit of fun.

“It’s their game of golf or cup of coffee, it’s their time out. Show them some respect.”

Even pre-Covid, the system on-course bookies had to work within seemed antiquated, particularly the throwback demand for a pitch fee of five times the general public admission price to each meeting, whether they happened to attend or not.

At the bigger tracks like Leopardstown and The Curragh, where Keenan has three pitches, that fee must be paid three times.

This comes on top of the original, fixed-asset, purchase price for the pitch and an annual registration fee paid to Horse Racing Ireland.

So is the on-course bookie an endangered species?

“If you were totally dependent on it, you’d be in real trouble,” suggests Keenan. “One lad I’d be friendly with has an engineering degree. He got married last October and had no choice but to go working on that. But he rang me only a week ago in frustration.

“He’s back on the pandemic payment through that now since Christmas.”

At home in Roscommon last week, Keenan was struck by a television interview on The Tonight Show with singer Brian Kennedy.

“He was talking about live entertainers and how their business has been decimated,” Keenan says. “But they have public sympathy and there’s a bit of political pressure there to support them. We’re just stonewalled completely, though.

“Like I’ve written to a few TDs and Government Ministers, highlighting the fact that we’re an employer, we pay employers’ PRSI, we pay USC, we pay income tax.

“Yet we’ve literally been frozen out, entitled to nothing.”

This Cheltenham week will, he suggests, be “surreal for everybody”.

“There’s no betting shop, there’s no pub and my understanding is that even the jockeys and trainers have to stay in the one place, that they can’t go anywhere. Look, it’s great to have it and I’ve a couple of bets laid, but it just won’t be the same.”

And the betting ring a year from now?

“There’ll definitely be some casualties,” suggests Keenan, who originally studied agri-business in UCD before choosing to follow in his father’s footsteps.

“I went to Kilbeggan the evening of sitting my last exam in the RDS and I’m still on my summer job since!” he says. “I love it and I’m desperate to get back to it.

“So what’s happening is desperately frustrating, upsetting actually. Along with it being your business, it’s your way of life. And there are easier ways to make money than driving 150,000 miles a year and standing out in all weathers.

“A lot of people have remortgaged houses to stay afloat, so we’re just hanging in there and hoping against all hope that we can have some bit of a second half of the summer.”

Hope that, right now, feels like a guttering candle.