There was a shock for the form-book on day one of the Galway festival when a group of Fine Gael politicians turned up in the winner's enclosure.
At a meeting synonymous with Fianna Fáil, members of the State's second-largest party tend to stick out like gatecrashers at a wedding. But there they were - Jim O'Keeffe, Billy Timmins, Paul McGrath, and a plethora of others - looking relaxed and happy as their horse took his place among the prize winners in the GPT Dublin Handicap Hurdle.
The 24-person syndicate, all Fine Gael TDs and senators, only just made the frame. The party has performed a Lazarus-style comeback since the last general election, and a bit like Lazarus, it came fourth yesterday. Over The Way, trained by Avril Doyle's daughter, Elizabeth, even needed the help of a late faller up front to get his nose into the money. Still, a result is a result, and the connections were quietly pleased with their €975 prize: a sum that would buy a whopping two-and-a-half lunches in the Fianna Fáil tent, if the syndicate members were so inclined.
When O'Keeffe described Over The Way as "an honest horse", this was just racing parlance, and not a comment on the sort of horses Fianna Fáil get involved with. But the syndicate didn't need much encouragement to have a go at the larger party anyway. Asked if Fine Gael was trying to reclaim the Galway Races, Billy Timmins bridled like awell, like a horse: "Fine Gael people have always followed racing - we just don't go shouting about it from the rooftops," he snorted.
Incidentally, if you were trying to spot the FG horse out on the track, his jockey was the one in the predominantly blue shirt (naturally).
There was a sobering note to the same race, in that the third-placed Blue Corrig was owned by Dick Forristal, the horse breeder murdered at his Waterford home last week after attending Turkish bomb victim Tara Whelan's funeral. Joe Crowley, the trainer and a life-long friend of the dead man, was both proud and disappointed at the result: "He ran well, but I suppose it was just too much to hope for that he would win."
As always on Monday in Galway, John O'Donoghue was the advance scout for today's Fianna Fáil invasion, which will be led by the Taoiseach. The Minister for Sport admitted he gets so much information about horses that "in biblical terms, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff". Even so, he ventured that Banasan would be the wheat in tomorrow's Galway Plate, while on the chaff end of the spectrum, he said he had avoided Over The Way "on principle".
It was a relatively subdued festival opening night, although the Patrician Brass Band could not be blamed for this as it entertained punters outside the owners' and trainers' bar. Among the tunes being belted out was The Stripper by David Rose, a brass band standard famous, as the title suggests, for its use as an accompaniment to striptease shows. It seemed a little out of place for a race meeting. Then again, by the end of the week, there'll be a lot of people here losing their shirts.
