Betting is becoming a respectable pastime, so no need to skulk in seedy bookies during Cheltenham, writes Kathy Sheridan.
After much discussion and analysis, the mysterious attraction of Cheltenham can now be revealed. All the horses are actually hoping to win. Apparently.
"They're not out for the fresh air," murmurs an insider, tapping his nose.
"This is a business where ducks don't swim in straight lines, but in Cheltenham, you know they're all trying," says a deadpan Ivan Yates, ex-politician and owner of 34 Celtic Bookmakers shops across the country and odds that make him "not exactly a philanthropist . . . but the Ryanair of the business".
So when triple Gold Cup champion Best Mate - out to surpass the great Arkle this year by aiming for a fourth - burst a blood vessel on Thursday, the racing nation went into mourning, rather than scratched its head. The champion's owner Jim Lewis, known as a rather emotional man from the back streets of Birmingham who funds his racehorses on the back of his bedroom furniture business, tried to maintain perspective: "I've had people crying their eyes out. You would think it is a disaster. It's not. A tsunami is a disaster."
Nonetheless, the Irish nation only exhaled again when it emerged that Tom Taaffe's Kicking King had galloped back into contention and is unstoppable. Dangerously so. "I'm not telling the horse to go to Cheltenham - the horse is telling me," explained Taaffe, opening up a whole new line of excuses for all those caught cavorting on camera next week who are purportedly "away on business", "out of coverage" or pulling a sickie.
On balance, the best advice in such cases is to stay at home and go down the bookies when the horses insist. The news for those who haven't laid a bet since they backed Royal Tan for their Granny after the war, is that bookie shops have improved beyond all recognition. "The women behind the counter are like air hostesses. There's carpets. And nice, soft chairs. And the papers. And free tea," whispers a well-pleased old habitue, putting a tenner on some unpleasant-looking greyhounds running in the 11.26 at Hall Green.
Take Boylesports. Ramble into the Stillorgan branch, say, in the quiet mid-morning for optimum views of soft carpets, wood-panelled walls, armchairs and air-conditioning, coffee machines and biscuits and sociable little round tables and chairs in the "café area". There is a "News Stand" (albeit with a distinct dearth of broadsheets) and more plasma screens than Nasa, showing obscure greyhounds chasing wobbly toy hares around tracks in venues that appear on no map. They have screens in the toilets in the newer branches, lest a chap is caught short before the 12 o'clock at Millers Field.
It costs about €250,000 to fit out a nice bookie shop these days. Ivan Yates says that with shops costing around €5,000 a week to run, he has to find €180,000 every week just to break even. None of this has daunted Boylesports' founder, John Boyle, who opened his first shop in Armagh in 1982. Massive expansion in the past four years has seen the chain grow by an average of 16 shops a year, adding up to 100 before the year's end. It now employs around 500 and has a turnover of some quarter of a billion euro in a market worth around three billion.
He still has a way to go to catch up on Paddy Power, however, which employs 1,300, had a turnover of €1.165 billion in 2004 and produced an operating profit of €31.1m. That is treble the turnover in 2000, the year the company was floated. Since then, it has acquired more than 30 shops around London and seen its internet and telephone businesses expand by about a third every year.
The bookmaking business has come in from the seedy sidestreets onto the high street and into the realms of high finance. John O'Reilly, now chief executive of Paddy Power, was a respectable accountant before joining the new company in 1988 and admits to some niggling doubts at the time. "My whole impression was that the industry was a bit tacky and seedy and that no one paid proper taxes . . . My whole experience of it was of going to Kilmartin's at about the age of 16 with the family's Grand National bets. Of course no-one should have let me anywhere near a bookies shop at that age." (The underage rule is strictly enforced in bookies shops these days, if only because gambling debts are not enforceable and all a parent has to do is ring up and demand the child's money back with menaces.)
In the Paddy Power HQ in Tallaght, in conditions that resemble a regular call centre rather than a bookie's, O'Reilly still looks like an accountant, if a genial one with an unusual interest in human behaviour and psychology, who laughs gleefully at the kind of games that bring punters into a Paddy Power website (the greyhounds of course are heralded with a "woof woof") "for a bit of fun for free" but where they'll "stick" for the betting.
Anyone who goes into a Paddy Power shop, for example, will notice that the furnishings are not quite as deep and soft as in Boylesports, nor is there free coffee necessarily on tap. This is deliberate and based on the "McDonald's principle" that while you want your customer to be comfortable, you really don't want him planting himself there for the whole day - "and I mean for the whole day," adds O'Reilly darkly, "enjoying the papers and the coffee". Looking at the age profile and leisurely air of the gentlemen around the shops, this seems a reasonable concern.
O'Reilly's strategy is backed by another bookie, if for a different reason: "Punters don't like to feel they're being watched . . . They're a bit funny like that. And fellas sitting around all day not betting can be a bit nosy".
For all that, the social aura around nipping into the bookies and taking a flutter has changed radically. The growth area now, they all insist, is in the middle classes. "It used to be that a shop was about location, location, location . . . That meant that it had to be beside a bus stop, a pub and an employment exchange. The best margins and volumes were in the working class areas," says John O'Reilly. "Now, while being beside a pub wouldn't be a disadvantage, it's more about accessibility and car parking." The Paddy Power shop beside the Goat pub in the determinedly middle-class south Dublin suburb of Goatstown has grown from a minnow to 111.5 square metres (1,200 sq ft). Stillorgan and Rathfarnham each have three shops, where they once had one. Even Dalkey has a bookies.
Back in Stillorgan's Boylesports, Gerry Gardener, the 25-year-old business graduate and district manager with responsibility for 18 shops and 80 staff, ticks off the number of young graduates who are managing shops: the 23-year-old female manager in Westmoreland St has a degree in spatial planning; another in Swords is a philosophy graduate; the Shankill manager did environmental science. It's a good, flexi-time earner with good overtime rates for students by all accounts, who then return for full-time work.
The marketing of the industry has also been a huge influence in the path to respectability, due in no small part to the efforts of Stewart Kenny and his ingenious "novelty" bets. Kenny, now retired from Paddy Power, recalls happily that on the last day of the punt's life, Bertie Ahern and Charlie McCreevy went to a Paddy Power shop to place a bet. That was a billet-doux to the industry from the lads. But Kenny is happy that the industry's growth hasn't come about "because people are losing money . . . It's because everyone will have a bet now and it's about fun. You're part of an occasion. The key thing to remember is that you're never going to make money out of gambling so forget about that". Betting is now being sold "as something to add value to viewing an event", says John O'Reilly. "It is driven by being able to see stuff. So in the shop you can see all the horse races, for example."
A new generation is being drawn in to the "huge" growth areas in sports that are unrelated to the horse and dog racing fare of the traditional bookie trade. According to Ivan Yates, the latter is only worth around 65 per cent of a bookie's turnover now. Some shops have a separate bank of screens dedicated to sports such as football, rugby, golf and cricket - hardly surprising when a single, live soccer match can offer 30 distinct "markets", only one of them being who wins.
To John O'Reilly, it's common sense that a young fellow who plays football will bet on a football match rather than a horse race. These days, introductions to televised football matches invariably quote the latest betting odds. And after all, only 12 per cent of an ageing population ever goes horse racing.
But everyone agrees that in terms of switching the nation on to "respectable" gambling, the Lotto was the greatest catalyst of all, albeit, snort the bookies, at ridiculous odds. The result is win/win for the bookies. Ivan Yates describes the Lotto as "serious, serious business for bookies". The industry is obliged to call it Lucky Numbers, of course, but prides itself on offering notably better odds than the real thing, ie 475/1 for three numbers or 4,500/1 for four, in Boylesports.
"It's craziness the amount of women who do it in places like Meath Street," says Gerry Gardener. "It's predominantly a working-class thing."
With such rampant growth, competition and shop saturation, the question is where to jump next. In 1999, online betting was hailed as the great usurper that would drive the traditional bricks-and-mortar operations out of business. John O'Reilly says cheerfully that they "totally missed out on the whole social activity of going into the betting office . . . Do you always want a can of beer alone at home? It's still the place you can go to see all the horseracing and you won't be alone." All areas - shop, telephone and internet betting - are growing but the profile of each category's spend is very different. Paddy Power shop customers spend up to 88 per cent of their money on the traditional dogs and horses bets. On the telephone it is up to 75 per cent. But on the internet it's only 55 per cent. The rate of spend is very different, too, in each category. The average bet of a Boylesports customer in the shops is €14; on the internet it's €60 and on the telephone it's €80.
Meanwhile, as the bookies look to Cheltenham, the year 2003 - the year the favourites won - will cast a long shadow across the customary optimism. Ivan Yates says that Brave Inca's victory that year alone cost him a quarter of a million. David Power, a third generation on-course bookmaker with his fourth generation son, Willie, also in action, remembers the bloodbath and, far from empathising, drawls: "I heard that some of the bookmakers lost six-figure sums but I didn't hear that any of them didn't come back.