Willie on…

HRI does a good job and I’m sure they lobbied very hard for more money, and hopefully we can see it coming down the line. I’d love to see more money getting into prize money, and particularly the jumping end.

Racing gives a great living in rural communities in Ireland, when you take this village alone here, 1,000 people directly benefiting from the racing element. Racing is just a shop window of the breeding industry and, when you have Joe Foley down there with Ballyhane, not 200 yards from here, and then Burgage Stud with Victor Connolly, they all employ huge amounts and the amount of trainers that are around here.

It’s a huge part of the rural community in Ireland and to keep that financed, and keep small villages like this alive, it’s something that shouldn’t be missed.

However, we’re happy to get what we do get and we try and make the most of it.

Point-to-point hurdles! I’m not sure I’m a lover of them. I’m sure I’ll have a few other runners in them. I think our ‘academy races’ are maiden hurdles and winners’ hurdles and novice hurdles.

These are, to me, just like a sales ploy, nothing else.

It’s extraordinary that you can have races inside the rails and basically the same as point-to-pointing, inside the rails. I’m not sure it’s a great decision.

I don’t think they’re anything like what they do in France. In France, when you win a race, you’re a winner. Here, when you win a point-to-point, you’re not a winner. And these rules are the same, and they’re inside the rails.

For years, we’ve been trying to protect our racing, our betting, by having rules for inside the rails, and now they’ve gone totally against it, which I find extraordinary. Noel Meade said the very same thing when they came out.

We’ll see how it pans out, but I think it broadly goes against the whole integrity of racing. It’s just a sales ploy.

They solved the problem that wasn’t there. I’ve run plenty of horses first time out in Grade 1 races over the years and they got on fine. To me, it wasn’t a problem that was there.

They’re looking for runners in all those races, have more runners, more open racing, they’re always crying out about that, now they’re closing it off.

In a few years’ time, they’ll be making incentives to get people to run in these races.

It definitely wasn’t a problem. They might actually create more problems, there wasn’t a problem to solve. They’re going to narrow their amount of entries.

I have Ethical Diamond pencilled in. We think that on the ground, everything will suit him. We’re going there as a competitor, rather than thinking we’re going to finish in the first three.

So if we got the first six finish, that’d be a good result for us, and I’m looking forward to it, if it all works out. He’s in good shape at the moment.

Absurde is down in Werribee preparing for the Caulfield Cup. I think a mile and a half of the Caulfield Cup would suit him a lot better than the Melbourne Cup, but you run in both, and that’s why they don’t have two runs this year.

And maybe when those horses come back, then look at where we might either go to Meydan or Saudi is a place l’d ike to go with them.

Those dual-purpose type horses, it’s better trying to look for different ways of competing with them rather than going back over hurdles, I think there’s not much to gain by going back over them.