an irish issue of great concern.

​Back in February horse racing was in the news for all the wrong reasons. A man I believed of great integrity, Gordon Elliott, later to be joined on a similar charge by the amateur jockey Rob James, was subject to what I believe was a sting operation. The photograph of him sitting astride a dead horse was one of the ugliest sights I have seen for many a long year. What made the photograph many times more vulgar and damning was that it involved one of the sport’s leading trainers, which gave the sport’s detractors an arsenal of invective to throw our way. For his stupidity, and it was stupidity not a snapshot of how Elliott cares for the horses in his charge, he was banned from the sport for 6-months. He also lost several high-profile, top-class horses to other trainers, horses that even Elliott and his wealthy clients will find difficult if not impossible to replace. The sentence, I believe, fitted the offence.
Roll forward 4-months and a far more serious offence has recently come before the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board and on this occasion the sentence goes nowhere near close enough to fitting the crime, and on this occasion a criminal act is involved.
How Stephen Mahon remains in the sport must be a mystery to all animal lovers. Back in 2008, he received the completely ludicrous punishment of a 4-month ban and a thousand-euro fine for a case of neglect and cruelty to a horse in his care that when brought to my attention by David Jennings in the Racing Post sickened me to my core. I am not by nature an emotional man; in many aspects of life, I may be said to have a heart of stone but when he described the depth of neglect and cruelty committed by Mahon, I had to skip ahead a paragraph to escape the image implanted in my mind’s eye. If you wish to research the topic, I suggest you look-up Pike Bridge along with Mahon and the I.H.R.B
Compare the sentence imposed on Gordon Elliott, 6-months for an act of stupidity with a horse that died of natural causes, and 4-months for cruelty to a living horse.
Yet here we are in 2021 and Mahon is up before the Regulatory Board on very similar charges, neglect and causing a horse unnecessary suffering. And yet again, unbelievably, he is treated leniently. He may be banned from having a trainers’ licence for 4-years but he is not warned-off, he can still work within the industry if anyone is foolish enough to trust him around their horses.
Richard Forrestal pointed out in his column in the Racing Post this week that Mahon has a wife and young family and that perhaps his sentence is a gesture of clemency with them in mind. Forrestal suggested that Mahon had no other means of supporting his family other than working with horses. I would suggest it is highly likely he can drive a horsebox, which would allow him to find employment as a lorry driver or some such similar occupation. If he so much a simpleton he cannot do any other work than with horses, it begs the question how he got a trainers’ licence in the first place.
But what Forrestal avoided in his column, and to their eternal shame the members of the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board also avoided, was that Mahon, in their judgement, as they found him guilty as charged, committed a criminal act and as such the report on the case should be handed over to the Gardai for investigation. Animal cruelty is criminality, in not reporting this matter to the Gardai it is possible the I.H.R.B. are guilty themselves of not reporting a criminal act. Yet here we have Mahon appealing the verdict against him, when he should be answering questions in a police station. He should be staring down the barrel of a prison sentence, not plotting to overturn the verdict of the inquiry.
Does the motto ‘The Horse Comes First’ not apply to the Republic of Ireland? Because if it is the ambition in Irish horse racing for the horse to come first, it has come a long way last in this case.
If the Mahon case gets the social media coverage that Gordon Elliott received, this sport, or at least horse racing in Ireland, is going to face a mountain of criticism and on this occasion, and thanks to the leniency of Irish racing’s regulatory body, it will have brought the criticism upon itself. Mahon should have been banned from both horse racing and keeping horses for the entirety of his lifetime.
And remember this also: Charles Byrne was banned from the sport by the I.H.R.B. and it was not even proven that he was guilty of doping the horse involved. The justice handed-out by the I.H.R.B. beggars belief, it truly does.