‘An industry in slow and sustained decline’: Greyhound racing facing up to tough questions

On Thursday, Tim Lucey, the chief executive of Greyhound Racing Ireland, appeared before the Dáil’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC). For the guts of three hours he fielded pointed questions, none of which came out of the blue. He would have expected a grilling on the sport’s welfare record, its falling attendances, its right to more than €20 million of State funding and the continuing Garda investigation into fraud at three of its tracks. On the alleged fraud, he couldn’t comment.

And he would have known that the deputies sitting opposite would not accept his first answer, or maybe any of his answers. The hostility was cross-party.

Greyhound racing spends most of its time out of sight and out of mind and it is never good news that brings it to the public’s attention. But just a month after greyhound racing was one of the big winners in the budget, a detailed report from the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) raised serious questions about the State’s continued support for the industry. The PAC was never going to turn a blind eye.

“The current evidence base suggests an industry in slow and sustained decline,” it said in the report. “Is State intervention simply arresting the inevitable collapse of this sector?”

On Thursday, in their allotted question time, every deputy returned to the same subjects. Ever since the scathing Prime Time Investigates programme on the industry in 2019, the mortality rate of racing greyhounds after they retire from the track has been under periodic scrutiny in the Dáil and in the media.

In response to that RTÉ investigation, and the outcry that followed, Greyhound Racing Ireland introduced a tracking system for every racing greyhound in their jurisdiction – a number that runs to 67,000 now since the system was launched five years ago. They also ramped up their welfare checks out of competition and invested more heavily in the rehoming of dogs once their career at the track had finished.

And yet, the numbers still don’t add up. The committee heard that 8,414 of the 12,766 dogs born between 2021 and 2024 had been reported dead on Greyhound Ireland’s traceability system. There is no provision to log the cause of death, but the clear suggestion was that many of these dogs had been euthanised.

“Why are dogs dying at such a high rate and so young?” asked Paul Murphy TD, before returning to the question a couple of minutes later from a slightly different angle. “Why are there three times more dogs killed than are being rehomed?”

With remarkable stamina and strength of mind, Lucey gave very few short answers during his three-hour stint in the hot seat, but this was one: “That’s a question that I’m not in a position to answer,” he said.

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The numbers quoted by Murphy, though, were not accurate. Between 2021 and 2024, more than 42,000 greyhounds were born here. Up to 28,000 of those dogs would have been exported and once they leave this jurisdiction, they are no longer on the Greyhound Ireland tracking system. To say that there was a 66 per cent mortality rate for pups born in 2021 is incorrect; the mortality figure is unknown.

Would that answer have been any help to Lucey in the chamber? Probably not.

In other places around the world, greyhound racing has been under siege or in decline for a long time. Earlier this year it was banned in Wales, where only one track remained, and in Scotland, where the last track closed in 2025. In August it was also banned in New Zealand.

In America it is now outlawed in 44 states and the only two tracks still operating are both in West Virginia. As recently as the early 1990s, according to The New York Times, greyhound racing in America drew “tens of millions of spectators” to 60 tracks around the country, generating €3.5 billion in betting turnover annually. Greyhound racing is still vibrant in parts of England, but once upon a time there were 33 tracks in the Greater London area and now there is just one.

The sport in Ireland is not divorced from any of these developments. The people who are wedded to the game and passionate about its athletes feel bombarded. They are not blind to the issues, but they are not bowed either. Dogs are rooted in them.

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“Animals racing, I understand [the difficulty] of that aspect of it in the current climate,” says Peter Cronin, one of the leading greyhound trainers in the country. “How do you convince someone in D4 that this is part of a traditional heritage for us. The welfare thing is the elephant in the room. How do we get that right? 99.9 per cent of people don’t rear dogs or mind dogs to do it wrong.

“But welfare is to the forefront of everything now. We have to do everything right, the dog has to be kept right, we have to avoid injuries at all costs. My children would be in floods of tears if anything happened to one of our dogs at the track. You’d be weeks trying to recover from it. I’ve seen grown men cry over dogs.”

During the PAC hearing on Thursday, the issue of attendances was repeatedly raised to question the virility of the industry and, unquestionably, crowds have been in decline for nearly 20 years. Between 2008 and 2018 attendances fell by 55 per cent. Over the last 10 years, numbers fell from 637,535 in 2015 to 351,637 in 2025, according to figures published by Greyhound Racing Ireland. Those attendances would include owners, trainers and industry staff which meant, according to Lucey, that only 72 per cent of the 2025 figure were paying customers.

And yet the number of meetings increased by 43 two years ago and by a further 15 in 2025. In part, what this reflects is a fundamental shift in the business model. In any given week, about half of the scheduled meetings are not designed for punters through the turnstiles. Instead, they are staged in the morning or afternoon so that Greyhound Racing Ireland’s media partner Sports International Services (SIS) can service a betting market around the world.

The trade-off for the tracks is guaranteed income. Crowds at evening meetings, Monday to Thursday, had fallen steeply over many years. For their daytime meetings, however, SIS pays the track €600 for every race they stage, according to industry sources. Typically, those meetings would have a 10-race card.

Those races also cater for a certain quality of greyhound that would struggle to be competitive at the weekend meetings.

“Those meetings are for the man with five or six dogs and three or four of them aren’t much good,” says Ian Fortune, a greyhound commentator for the last 25 years. “It gives them an opportunity to race them and get money for it.”

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In those races, the dogs who finish outside the first three are guaranteed €40 for their owners: essentially, an appearance fee. Depending on the grade of race, the winning owner would take home between €220 and €240.

“You wouldn’t be in this game for the money,” says Cronin. “We just do it for the love of dogs. It’s like the GAA fellas togging out in the rain in January.”

But at the elite level the game is still awash with money. The first prize for the Irish Greyhound Derby is €125,000; the winner of the English Greyhound Derby picks up £125,000 (€149,600).

“If I saw a dog at Shelborne Park tomorrow and I thought he could potentially win the Derby,” says Fortune, “and someone said to me you could get him for 100 grand, I could ring 25 men in the morning and they’d spend it. The top end of the sport is still very much alive.”

England remains a huge export market for Irish breeders. According to Lucey, “85 or 86 per cent” of dogs running at English tracks were bred here. But unlike in the past, many of the best dogs are trained in Ireland. In the English Derby this year, all six dogs in the final were Irish trained.

One of the issues that has haunted Irish greyhound racing, though, is overbreeding. For many years the anti-greyhound racing lobby have accused Irish breeders of culling dogs that were surplus to requirements. Those in the industry have always rejected that. The numbers, though, were impossible to square.

“In 2001 or 2002 there could have been as many as four or four-and-a-half thousand litters being born annually in Ireland,” says Damien Matthews, chair of the Irish Greyhound Owners and Breeders Federation. “That was at the height. Last year it was 1,670, nearly one third of what it used to be. There’s a happy medium. I don’t want overbreeding and dogs being euthanised that shouldn’t be euthanised.

“But the four-and-a-half thousand people involved in the sport, we are being bullied. We are being portrayed as serial euthanisers. We are being portrayed as bad people with greyhounds and there’s nothing being done about it [in our defence] and nothing being said about it.

“I went on RTÉ, I went on Newstalk and openly invited the antis to come to my kennels and have a look. Nobody talks about the people who are doing the right thing. Nobody communicates that.”

Around the country, greyhound racing still has hotbeds. Among the regional tracks, Kilkenny has been a resurgent success. The stadium was basically knocked and rebuilt at a cost of €1.7 million. This year, 26 clubs, schools and charities held fundraising nights at the track and every meeting in December is sold out.

“We’ve had a great year,” says Tom Kinane, the stadium manager. “Attendances are way up. It’s booming here.”

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On Saturday morning, Kilkenny staged a greyhound sales with 65 dogs in the catalogue. Early morning trials were followed by an auction and some dogs will change hands for €20,000 to €40,000. At an event like that, nobody will feel that the game is under threat.

“With all the constant barrage and negative social media that’s going on how could you be confident [about the future],” says Matthews. “We’re running from one fire to the next fire to the next.”

But then in the next breath he says that he’s working on a “five and 10-year” strategy for the future of the sport from an owners and breeders point of view.

And why not? The bottom line is that greyhound racing here has political cover. A day before Lucey appeared in front of the PAC, the Minister for Agriculture Food and the Marine Martin Heydon appeared before an Oireachtas Agriculture Committee to repeat his support for the Horse and Greyhound fund, which is in his bailiwick.

Most of the deputies sitting opposite nodded their heads. Despite the sustained hostility directed at Lucey in the PAC session on Thursday, there is no stomach in the Dáil to cut the ground from under the greyhound industry. There are no votes in it.

“The decision as to whether to provide ongoing support to this sector is ultimately a political one,” concluded the PBO report.

That is their safety net.