When Minister for Agriculture Martin Heydon appears before the Oireachtas agriculture committee on Wednesday, he will defend State funding for greyhound racing despite a critical assessment from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), the Oireachtas’s independent watchdog. That is not surprising. Successive governments have been painfully slow to address serious questions about a sector that could not survive without public money.
Those fall into two categories. The first is whether the State gets value for money. Greyhound racing receives about ¤20 million a year, almost half of the 2024 revenue of Rásaíocht Con Éireann, which runs the sport. Yet the only economic data comes from reports commissioned by RCÉ itself. The latest, published in 2021, claimed 4,150 jobs.
The film tax credit, by contrast, is subject to cost-benefit analysis by the Department of Finance. Arts Council funding undergoes formal value-for-money reviews and is awarded competitively. Greyhound racing gets a statutory 20 per cent of the Horse and Greyhound Racing Fund.
These comparisons are instructive because the case for film and the arts is also cultural and social. Greyhound racing is defended as a traditional rural pursuit. Yet average attendance per meeting has fallen from 388 to 235 in a decade, a decline that should inform policy.
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There is a graver concern. Welfare advocates have long argued greyhounds are overbred and discarded. The PBO found that 70 per cent of dogs born in 2022 that stayed in Ireland and stopped racing had died by January 2026.
The Indecon review of the fund, delivered last year, urged a bigger welfare ringfence and agreed targets. But both are remarkably loose, with no figures or deadlines, and the Department monitors its own progress.
None of this is satisfactory. The industry assesses its own value. Serious welfare questions go unanswered. Statutory funding continues regardless of dwindling public interest. And the Minister offers a reflexive defence of the status quo.
Change is long overdue.
