Qualla: Horse Racing in Ireland

Horse Racing in Ireland: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It started, the story goes, with a wager between two neighbours and a cask of wine. Edmund Blake and Cornelius O'Callaghan looked out across the County Cork countryside from Buttevant in 1752 and pointed at the steeple of the church four and a half miles away in Doneraile. They would race their horses across whatever lay between - fences, ditches, hedgerows, streams - and the first man to ride past the second steeple would win the cask. They invented something more useful than they knew. The steeplechase, named for the steeples they used as landmarks, went on to become an entire branch of horse racing, and Ireland the country that made it.

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Horse Racing in Ireland: Older Than the Cask

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Horse racing in Ireland predates the steeplechase by a long way. The ancient text Togail Bruidne Da Derga, the Destruction of the Mansion of Da-Derga, describes chariot races on the Curragh of Kildare during the reign of Conaire Mor, somewhere between 110 BC and 60 AD. A 7th-cent...

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Horse Racing in Ireland: Buttevant to Doneraile

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Then came Blake and O'Callaghan. Their match in 1752 has a claim to be the first true steeplechase. The riders had no marked course, only the two steeples to navigate by, and they crossed open country at whatever pace and angle they could manage. The race was won, the wine drunk,...

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Horse Racing in Ireland: Why Ireland

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The reason Ireland breeds racehorses well, and has done so for centuries, is partly geological. The limestone bedrock of the central plain and parts of Munster pulls calcium up through the soil and into the grass, which in turn pulls it into the bones of foals grazing on those fi...

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Horse Racing in Ireland: A Horse Nation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Roughly twenty thousand people were thought to be employed in Irish racing during the First World War. The British government's brief 1917 ban, prompted by complaints about how much oats were being fed to thoroughbreds at a time of food shortage, caused such an outcry in Ireland ...

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