Profound waste of taxpayers’ money on greyhound racing has been laid bare

The extent to which greyhound racing is a profound waste of taxpayers’ money was crystallised this week. The distiller was the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO), which released a new report on Ireland’s “costly love affair with greyhounds.” The report accentuates the costs and questions the “love affair” bit.

Greyhound racing has been handed more than €20 million of taxpayer money in the 2027 budget, adding to an allocation of around €380 million since the establishment of the horse and greyhound funding mechanism in 2001.

The money comes from the Department of Agriculture, rather than Sport, because of a neat verbal trick that has classed horse and greyhound racing as industries rather than sport. But if greyhound racing is indeed an industry, then it’s going the way of video rental stores.

The kicker comes in the form of a question towards the end of the report. “Is State intervention simply arresting the inevitable collapse of the sector?”

The report asks that devastating question after assembling a mountain of evidence. Average attendance figures per meeting have dropped 45 per cent in the space of 10 years, to 235 people per meeting. Remarkably, the report finds that between 2021 and 2024, an average of just 53 per cent of attendees at races actually paid to get in.

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The report also points out that greyhound racing can hardly be considered some kind of expression of our national culture given that, in 2019, Tourism Ireland told the spor-, sorry, industry’s governing body that greyhound racing would no longer feature in domestic or overseas marketing campaigns.

This quiet airbrushing of the sport pales into comparison with the action taken recently by Scotland, Wales, and New Zealand, all of which have banned greyhound racing, primarily on welfare grounds.

Irish racing is addressing welfare concerns, with €3.79 million of the 2026 State allocation ring-fenced for this purpose. This has not assuaged the PBO’s concerns; its report points out that exported greyhounds are no longer traced through the Irish system. Of greater concern, though, are findings from the data that is tracked. The report analysed the greyhound cohort for 2021 and 2022 and found that 10,010 greyhounds were no longer racing and had not been exported. Of these, 63 per cent (6,153 dogs) are dead.

The report claims that these animals were aged between approximately three-and-a-half and five-and-a-half years, and says the generally accepted lifespan of a greyhound is between 10 and 14 years.

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But if the State has a primary concern with welfare, then surely the best way forward is to stop funding greyhound racing in the first place.

This report should also serve as a warning to every other sports body in the country, because the PBO picks holes in the economic impact report on which the greyhound funding is predicated.

It has lately become gospel for sports governing bodies to commission their own economic impact reports, in which an economist or university runs various numbers to come up with a headline figure showing what the relevant sport contributes in hard currency back to the exchequer. This is then waved at Government whenever the governing body comes looking for money.

The FAI has issued one for the League of Ireland. The GAA has released its own, which states that the organisation contributes €1.056 billion to the economy, in that this is what it would cost to adequately pay every GAA volunteer for their time. This is patently absurd: nobody has ever proposed paying every GAA volunteer because it would be a) economically unviable and b) insulting to volunteers to put a price on their time.

But in a political culture that measures success in euro and cents – we recall minister for sport Patrick O’Donovan ballyhooing this year that few other Government sectors could point to any return on investment as successful as his department’s hosting of the NFL at Croke Park – then it’s hard to blame any sports governing bodies for putting their best economic-impact foot forward.

The early adopters of the economic impact report were horse and greyhound racing, and the number of rural jobs both support is the minister for agriculture’s annual justification whenever it comes to topping up their coffers. The PBO report, however, describes the greyhound version of this as “not the most helpful” in assessing whether the taxpayer is getting bang for their buck from the dogs.

The issue, says the PBO, is that the economic impact report does not consider which of the activities it cites would be happening without the State investment. For instance, the greyhound industry states it contributes to 4,150 people being in direct and indirect employment, which includes 300 people in the “manufacture, sales and distribution of dog food”. Would all of this dog food business really disappear with the greyhounds?

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The PBO says there should instead be a cost-benefit analysis conducted that considers this, along with the opportunity cost of the money that is directed to greyhound racing and the “tangible and intangible” benefits of investment.

In this rush to justify returns on investment, the official Irish attitude is losing sight of the intangible benefits of sport, which include fostering dreams, driving participation, and providing vital social outlets. Sports governing bodies should not need to justify their funding demands in abstruse figures.

The PBO report should be the end of our lavish funding of greyhound racing. It might be the beginning of the end of the modern phenomenon of the economic impact report too.