DISCOMFORT ZONE:Columnist and arts critic FINTAN O'TOOLEtries his luck at the Naas races

THINGS WERE so quiet before the first race at Naas that two bookies were taking bets among themselves. Could that really be your man from The Irish Times, wandering around like a eunuch at an orgy, studying his race card in a transparently unsuccessful attempt to look like he knows what is going on? One of the bookies insisted that it was. But what, asked the other, would John Waters be doing at the races?

I introduced myself and was about to ask for some tips. A small voice inside me told me that asking a bookie for tips might be the equivalent of asking a hawk to mind your hatchery. "You should have read Tony Sweeney in The Irish Times," the bookies said. "That's what we do."

An Irishman who has reached the age of 51 without ever have been properly at the races is a contradiction in terms. I was at a corporate event in Leopardstown once, but it was cold outside, so I spent the entire time in the bar watching Bertie Ahern and his entourage, who were cockier than jockeys and more alert that any high-strung thoroughbred. My wife, my son and myself bet on the Aintree Grand National every year, using an infallible combination of bottomless ignorance and reckless whims. We’ve picked five of the last six winners. This is quite enough excitement for one year.

I am shielded from the spell of the track by a range of hearty prejudices. I worked in my youth with too many men who slipped down to the bookies in the afternoon with an air of hungry certitude and crept back looking a foot shorter, the aura of defeat clinging around them like stale aftershave.

I find it pretty outrageous that vast chunks of public money are used to subsidise the favourite pastime of developers and politicians. And I can’t really believe that anything involving animals or machines counts as a sport.

I’m told, however, that this indifference to the turf makes me somehow a stranger to the real Ireland. The racetrack, apparently, is where we let our hair down, where the Irish spirit of devil-may-care risk-taking defies the soulless, regimented modern world. If this is the arena of chancers, it is also the field of chance, open to the thrill of muscle and blood, of skill and danger, of fate and fortune. So I rode the bus through the unromantic terrain of the Red Cow roundabout and the commuter belt to Naas racecourse for a midweek evening meeting.

There is certainly something magical about veering out of the greater Dublin suburbia and into this other world. As you go in the gates, the huge horse transports are lined up to the left, and jockeys, grooms and trainers are ambling around the car park. It reminded me of the feeling of going to the circus, that mixture of the mundane and the extravagant, the ordinary and extraordinary mingling with an unselfconscious ease. The place itself reinforces this feeling. It is like a Potemkin village in reverse: the banal facade of functional stands and bars gives way to a gorgeously deep vista of undulant hills whose greenery glows in the moist evening light. The humdrum, apathetic cows that graze in the centre of the course seem to be placed there specially to enhance by contrast the sleek beauty of the horses that pass them in a blur of fluid motion and fluttering silks.

Yet none of this seems at all wild. Maybe it's because, as the bookies tell me, the builders who would usually be out in force are at home tonight, weeping softly into their satin pillows. The crowd instead is a mixture of hardcore racegoers and Kildare GAA supporters – the night is in part a benefit gig for the county teams. But in general the racecourse is a highly ordered space, much more so than any other kind of sporting arena. It reminded me of the fourth book of Gulliver's Travelsin which the narrator discovers a world ruled by the civilised, fastidious Houyhnhnms – actually horses – who are bothered by the messy, uncouth Yahoos (humans). Here at the racetrack, the Houyhnhnms are definitely in charge, and they have taught the Yahoos to behave themselves. Watching them lead the subservient humans around the parade ring, it struck me that the regal, quietly superior horses had somehow invented all of this for their own amusement and tricked the humans into arranging it for them.

The horses are at the top of the hierarchy, but it continues in fine gradations through the ranks of the racegoers. This is a stratified world. There are the overdressed owners and members, dining at linen-draped tables in the restaurant. There are the plebs in the self-service restaurant, eating roast beef with chips and denying bored children more coke. There are the serious punters, stony-faced, taciturn men, each on his own, with a racing card sticking out of his jacket pocket and a pair of binoculars around his neck. And there are the garrulous gamblers, mostly men of middle age and expansive girth, gathered in the space between the bar and the Tote, watching racing from other courses in England and following the Naas card on the screen as well, as if to venture outside would be to lose the necessary distance from the hurly-burly in which money is lost and won.

It is this distance that strikes me most of all. I expected some lusty raucousness, the melodrama of enraging failures and exhilarating successes. But as a spectator sport, racing equates to what they say about war – long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of terror. There’s a race every half hour and it lasts for about two minutes. Of that two minutes, about 90 seconds is a faraway bustle of motion on the other side of the track, with only the commentator’s drone to tell you what’s going on. There are then 30 seconds of shouting as the horses hove into view and push for the post. But the yelps and yahoos die a sudden death and everyone – winners and losers – assumes a mask of passivity. There is no ripping up of dockets, no fists raised to curse the gods, no hats in the air. It seems to be bad form to show you care too much.

This didn’t particularly suit my own mood. Having decided that I needed to bet in order to experience the races properly, and concluding that Madam might not be too amused at an expenses claim for backing gee-gees (even a British MP might baulk at that one), I started to pony up.

I first tried my trusted method of picking a name I liked: Radical Rave. I realised it was doomed when, on the only occasion he mentioned it (as it was being loaded into the stalls), the commentator called it Radical Wave – clearly a famous beast. I then tried the cunning plan of going for the horse listed first on the card – King’s Bastion. He turned out to be more Peasant’s Hovel. I then sought help by stalking some serious-looking punters with hound’s-tooth jackets and demanding a sure thing for the next race. They gave me Cilium, owned by the former Dublin GAA great Tony Hanahoe. All I can say is that if this was an omen, Dublin will not be winning the All-Ireland anytime soon. Lastly, I tried consulting the newspaper experts, who all agreed on Final Approach for the eight o’clock. He should have been called Last Straw.

I slunk off into the gathering gloom, muttering darkly while the other punters perfected their looks of stoical fortitude. My only consolation was that if I had won, I might have been tempted to come back.