THROUGH his role at Ballylinch Stud, his own achievements as a breeder and involvement with the European Breeders’ Fund, of which he is currently chairman, John O’Connor has developed a reputation that means when he speaks, people listen. So that’s exactly what I did when I had the chance to pick his brain, while he prepared to jet off to Germany for the BBAG Yearling Sale.

Bayside Boy’s fantastic start at stud must be particularly satisfying given that he’s a Ballylinch homebred and by New Bay?

Absolutely. He’s made a great start, we’re delighted with that, and fairly confident he’ll build on that pretty strongly. He was actually better himself as a three-year-old. He improved from two to three, so we’d anticipate plenty of progress from the stock. The fact that he’s a homebred is an added satisfaction, and by one of our own sires - it’s a good package all round for sure.

He was a talented two-year-old himself, but didn’t debut until July. Were you expecting his stock to be as precocious as they’ve been?

I didn’t expect him to be quite as quick off the blocks as he was. The trainers were telling me how well they were training, so I was confident that he was going to do it with his two-year-olds.

Like you say, he didn’t start himself until July, so it was quite a surprise that he had so many in April and May, but when you look at him, he’s a very solid, precocious-looking horse himself and when he did win his maiden, he got the highest Timeform rating for a debutant that year, so there’s a kind of natural precocity there.

He ticked many boxes as a stallion prospect, but plenty of horses with similar profiles don’t make it. Is there an element of chance as to whether a horse makes a successful stallion?

Of course, there is an element of chance, and you need to be lucky that any sire that you stand turns out to be good because the odds are against it; the percentages of top stallions are very low compared to the number of stallions that go to stud. So, when it happens, you have to be very pleased that it happens, and for someone like us, to have more than one horse going well at any one time, when you’ve got a relatively small number of sires, you’ve got to be very lucky to do it, and we’re delighted to get that bit of luck.

His sire New Bay is among those driving demand for sons of Dubawi. What do you believe makes a good sire of sires?

It’s an interesting one because initially with Dubawi, everybody felt he wasn’t going to make a good sires of sires with his first couple of sons that went to stud, so it can be difficult to predict.

I think there’s something about the Dubawis in terms of temperament, mentality and soundness. As we all know, his own stock when they hit the market first didn’t meet everyone’s expectations and he had to prove himself and he’s done that obviously to make a really outstanding stallion and his sons, the best ones, seem to be doing pretty much the same thing - they’re getting those tough, natural racehorses that trainers and owners really like.

Look De Vega is Ballylinch’s newest recruit and welcomed his first foals this spring. How was he received by breeders and how would you describe his stock so far?

Breeders loved him, which was great for us. He probably covered the biggest first season book of any sire that we stood, and he was very well supported by both Irish and international breeders. They loved the way he looked and the way he moved. We could even see it when the horse would walk around the corner, you nearly knew straight away that somebody was going to book a mare in. It hasn’t happened to me very often, but it did to this fella, and so he covered a big book.

He was fertile, and he’s got a very good first crop of foals, who seem to have the same kind of very active movement that he has himself. So, it’s a promising start for sure, and he’s been given a great chance both by ourselves and other shareholders and very good Irish breeders, international breeders as well. So, he’s no excuse if he doesn’t make it pay, let’s put it that way.

He won the Prix du Jockey Club, as did Lope De Vega, New Bay and previous Ballylinch resident Lawman. What makes that race so successful at producing stallions?

I think, in general, it’s won by a horse with miler speed and class. I think it’s possibly to do with the configuration of the track. If you don’t get a very good draw, you need a lot of tactical pace to be able to get yourself a decent position, or else the ability to quicken enormously in what’s a relatively short straight.

Lope de Vega himself, I think is the only horse to win drawn as wide as he was. He was drawn 20 of 22; he was in the accessory stalls, but he was an exceptional racehorse, and that’s probably why he’s an exceptional sire as well.

The Prix du Jockey Club’s success has fuelled calls for the Irish Derby to be shortened in distance. What are your thoughts on that?

I can remember the initial discussions in relation to the shortening of the Prix du Jockey Club, and I was on the record at the time as saying, if that goes through, then the faster middle-distance horses will go to France, and that’s kind of turned out to be the way it is, and I think that’s having an effect on the other derbies.

Having said that, I think we shouldn’t automatically assume that that’s where the future is going to be. I think people are gradually starting to understand that stamina is a very valuable resource, soundness and stamina. It hasn’t transferred fully into the commercial market yet, but I think there’s work to do by race planners, regulators, etc, to make sure that horses that take a little bit longer to mature are suitably rewarded for the extra time that it takes. It’ll be good for the breed if that comes to be the case.

The increase in popularity for foals and yearlings with stamina pedigrees is partly due to their high resale value to the likes of Australia. It might be good commercially, but isn’t necessarily good for the standard of the mile-and-a-half-plus races we have here. So, I suppose it’s a little bit of a double-edged sword.

That is a dilemma for sure. They become valuable to sell abroad, not just to Australia, but to the Middle East as well, and other jurisdictions. But that does have the effect of hollowing out some of the later three-year-old races. So, it’s a bit of a dilemma, but once enough of them are getting bred, that will even out.

We’re coming up to the Irish Champions Festival, which you were involved in establishing, when it was Irish Champions Weekend. How involved are you in it now?

Less so now. Joe Foley, Harry McCalmont and myself were very involved at the early stages, a little bit less so now. We are there to advise and help in whatever way we can, but it’s largely now run by HRI and the two racecourses involved.

I’m not certain changing it from Weekend to Festival makes a significant difference or not, but I think the meeting itself is well established. The races have come together very well, I think it’s part of the international programme, and I think it’s a big part of the second half of the Irish racing season - and an important part in my opinion.

The Irish EBF are important sponsors over the course of the weekend, as they are throughout the year. The EBF’s contribution to prize money continues to grow and is much appreciated, but do you often feel frustrated by the lack of growth outside of the EBF’s contribution?

I think all owners feel pretty strongly that prize money is somewhat static, probably improving slightly. I think HRI are making a good effort now, but the costs of keeping a horse in training have risen exponentially over the last number of years and you can understand why that is; from a trainer’s point of view, it’s an expensive operation to run.

I suppose you could say that prize money is the lifeblood of racing - it’s very, very important in terms of people minimising the amount they lose rather than making money. But the EBF has done well, it’s a reflection of how strong the stallion roster in Ireland is now. It’s based on the numbers covered and stud fees, but I think it’s very important to say that basically every stallion in Ireland is in the EBF, it’s not just the expensive stallions, although they contribute the most.

But Ireland is lucky that we’ve got cohesion between flat, National Hunt, etc, so the EBF represents the entire industry in terms of support for the racing industry, and now it’s contributing over €3 million a year, which is an enormous sum, really, when you think about it. And it’s all voluntary by stallion owners, so I think it’s something Ireland can be proud of.

Many of the schemes supported by the EBF help to reduce the impact of fashion, which can be a major challenge for breeders, and the same could be said for stallion owners. Make Believe regularly produces stakes horses and offers value at €10,000, but we’ve seen similar sires sold abroad to the likes of Turkey. Is standing that class of stallions less lucrative than it used to be?

There are horses who everybody knows are good, but can sometimes be underestimated by the market. Having said that, I think that it creates opportunities for clever buyers, trainers, agents, etc, who can step away a little bit from fashion and, at the same time, find themselves a good horse. Make Believe is not unique in that, but he’s a very good example of it.

Ballylinch have some impressive drafts coming up at the yearling sales, both in Ireland and Newmarket. How do you decide which yearlings go to which sales?

We start in Deauville and go on to most major sales from there. So, to a certain extent, we need headliners in pretty much every draft. We split them up, but we’ll have at least one headline horse in every draft, and then we try to pick the horses that we think will fit the kind of customers that turn up at a particular sale.

Sometimes we have partners, or we might have a client who boards with us, and they would have specific preferences, and we’ll go with that, obviously. But we generally find that we spread our nice horses across the different sales.

Ballylinch’s operation also includes Castlemartin Stud - what aspects of the business take place there?

Castlemartin has everything except stallions. The stallions are based at Ballylinch, but other than that, Castlemartin has a foaling unit, mares, foals, yearlings - probably 50% of the yearlings are prepared in Castlemartin.

We’ve had a great deal of success with Castlemartin-produced horses in recent times, including Breeders’ Cup winners and everything, so the roll of honour from Castlemartin is very impressive, but that’s not a surprise because Lady O’Reilly was very successful when she owned it.

I think the industry was collectively relieved that Castlemartin remained in the thoroughbred business.

Location-wise, that was always a possibility, but John Malone (the US-based owner of Ballylinch) is a great guardian of land like that. He likes to maintain agricultural land as agriculture, and he’s famed for it in the United States, for green belts between farms, etc, so I think it’s in pretty good hands.

Between your different roles, which cover both flat and National Hunt, do you ever switch off?

[Laughs] I really enjoy the whole business, so I’m not trying to switch off. I actually took a couple of days with my family down in Dunmore East for the last couple of days. They’ve stayed on, but I’m on my way over here (to Germany). It was great to be able to do that, but I’m not big into holidays.

I love the kind of business that we’re in, and the fact that it’s ever changing and so challenging. If you switch off, you probably get left behind in this game. It’s a puzzle that can never really be solved. People play Wordle and other things like that, I try to maybe solve the conundrum of the bloodstock business, which is equally challenging. I think for that reason, I don’t have time for those other distractions.

I think you’ve summed it up really well. It’s impossible to get bored in this game.

Yes, it’s multifaceted and it’s not all at the top level. There are fascinating parts of the industry at lower levels. You hope that that’ll be sustained, because that’s what makes the tapestry of the business so varied and so open to so many different groups of people.

I love to see syndicates doing well and small breeders and people who lease their horses - all sorts of different ownership models. I’d love to see them better rewarded through increased prize money. That’s a challenge and everybody knows that, it’s worldwide. We’re well behind countries that have different betting models. So, we need to keep being inventive to make sure that prize money doesn’t lag too far behind countries that have better models.

We’re in a historic system, other countries developed different models of funding they’re raising from the betting product. We’re in the system that we’re in. We need to maximise returns from that as best we can, and that means cooperating with other industries in terms of how the return goes back to the producer and the owner and the trainer and the staff, of course, that look after the horses.

I’m not unique by any means in what I do, but I would encourage everybody who has a stake in the industry to make sure that they’re contributing back what they can in terms of their expertise or their abilities for the betterment of the entire industry.

This doesn’t necessarily mean joining a committee or anything like that - it could be as simple as hosting a farm walk for other breeders, where the experience you’ve gained in the industry can be shared with people trying to get going and give them the confidence or the support that they need to keep going.