Irish racing needs to wake up and pay for professional stewarding

The controversy around the case of jockey Philip Byrnes’s unseat from Redwood Queen at Wexford last May should be the tipping point that propels Irish racing towards professional stewarding. But it requires the entire sport and the industry behind it to wake up, smell the ridicule and pony up the money to make it happen. The Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) last week released a statement outlining how a referrals committee chaired by Justice Peter Kelly exonerated Byrnes from the charge of deliberately jumping off the mare trained by his father, Charles. The fallout from that statement has been almost as charged as the original incident itself. None of it has shown Irish racing in a...