IN May 2018 Nicky Hartery succeeded Joe Keeling as chairman of Horse Racing Ireland. He was also taking on a role that his neighbour Denis Brosnan held for many years. During that time he has shunned publicity, preferring to work with his board and executives at HRI to plan a prosperous future for Irish racing and breeding.

Ahead of this year’s Longines Irish Champions Weekend, he spoke exclusively to The Irish Field, focusing on the key challenges facing the industry and HRI’s plans for the future. The most immediate concern is that of Brexit and the fallout from its implementation. The scenario is a constantly changing one, presenting unprecedented challenges for all businesses.

Looking back on his first year as chair, I asked him if the role was time consuming, to comment on how the year has panned out and his hopes for the future. “No, to be frank, it is not time consuming. What I’ll say to you is that there’s a good team in HRI. One of the things that I’m very interested in is having good processes to get things done, and getting people focused into specific areas.

“With Brian Kavanagh and the team we work to make sure we are getting better every year. We keep asking ourselves are we better this year than last year, is the industry better off and are we hitting the points we need to hit to make it happen?

“We had a great set of numbers for the first half of the year. So our job is to accentuate that and make it better again. Facing into Brexit for all industries is a problem. All you can do is get into damage limitation mode as much as possible. It’s going to be interesting for us in HRI and the first race meeting after October 31st is at Down Royal.

“There’s great work done between Government departments. There’s a lot of excellent work done between Brian and his team, the UK team and the French team with Brussels. So everyone is ready to go, but nothing can get done until something is agreed. We have a big industry to protect.”

Hartery on the Curragh

“I certainly think it’s been value for money. It was over budget, nobody can deny that, but there’s been a lot of goodness in the development and I think we’ve got a race course now with facilities that are second to none. A huge amount of credit for this must go to the founder investors who have made a wonderful contribution.

“Like every project that you do there’s always teething issues. Are they insurmountable? Absolutely not. So they’ll all get addressed. The Curragh board has shown great commitment to delivering this project for the good of Irish racing and must be commended.

“Pat Keogh is an absolute seasoned veteran at managing a racecourse. He’s done a super job in Leopardstown and I believe he will do exactly the same for the Curragh. I have the utmost confidence that Pat can deliver. I would say to you that he’s an exceptionally good listener.

“There’s a clientele that’s very different now. The feedback to me was fair to be frank. We were asking people to pay an awful lot more than they had paid in prior years and was that the package that they were looking for, to continue their association with the Curragh? No. It’s turned a lot of regular customers off.

“What you have to do is take it on board, because if people genuinely make the effort to call you it means they are genuinely interested. And that’s the part to me that’s important. Pat listens and, more than anything, it’s the fact that people are being heard and being taken seriously.

“The thing is, the Curragh is a fantastic race track. We have the best horses in the world here. As a country we have a product that’s globally respected, and we should never forget that.

“We should never forget that we have to retain that and keep enhancing it as we go forward. That’s the role that we play in HRI.”

Niamh Connolly presenting Nicky Hartery with a Connolly's Red Mills / The Irish Field Breeder of the Month Award for Margot Did \ carolinenorris.ie

Hartery on the Strategic Plan

“We have put together a fairly robust Strategic Plan and we did that purposely because we have an industry that has more to offer. One of the positive surprises for me was to find that there’s just under 30,000 people employed, full-time and part-time in the industry, and the industry is worth just under two billion in economic value. I said to the team let’s break it down by the constituent parts around Ireland and see what we bring to the different regions.

“It’s a green industry; it’s outside of Dublin, and we are always looking for industry that can be supported outside of Dublin. “We believe there’s a good opportunity for us to move forward as an industry. We believe that with Brexit and other issues looming, which could cause difficulties in the farming communities, that we are there and we can be supportive. We can create another viable industry for people.

“I would say that we will publish the Strategic Plan post-Brexit. The one thing I would call out which we have a lot of positivity between the Department of Agriculture, Minister and ourselves is around the Equine Centre. There was a crisis this year and we want to make sure we are fit for purpose, that we are leaving no stone unturned as regards the capability of the industry to protect itself. So I hope to see that as part of the programme moving forward.

“The plan was signed off by the board and it’s with the Department. We have advanced issues like a second all-weather, like the proposal for the Equine Centre, as far as we can. We obviously need to publish it and that depends on getting a solution on funding.

“Once that happens we can move forward. The work is done. What’s difficult for any industry or business is to run without a Strategic Plan, or a direction of travel as I call it. We had a great occurrence this year which was the implementation of the new betting tax. We put up our hand and we said that we don’t want all of it. If you want to give it to us, fine, but it’s not needed. We want to grow a sustainable industry, because what you want to end up with in five years’ time is a better industry to pass on to someone else and say ‘now take it and make it better again’.

“The ingredients are there to get our Strategic Plan implemented and to move on. We just need the Brexit piece and all that uncertainty to dissipate.”

Hartery on Horse Racing Ireland

“There’s many different bodies that feed into HRI. Like all boards, one has to ask how many members are appropriate, what’s a good working number? Typically you find on the board of a plc that is around 10. So you could say that in HRI we are probably heavy, but the industry needs to participate.

“The question is could you cluster more of that together or not? We haven’t spent a whole lot of time considering that; what we have spent the time doing in the first year is working with the committees to make sure they work and deliver what’s needed for the board.

“What type of chairman am I? It’s an interesting question; I never sat down and thought about it. I think one needs to understand the brief that one has, and ask what are the key things that the industry needs? I would say it is always important to have good listening skills, and important to be able to decide what’s good information and what’s not. We have very capable people on the board.

“It’s also important to stay focused on what is important, like for instance welfare, both of the employees and of the thoroughbred. I think that’s really, really important, and we have people working on both sides of this issue at the minute.

“You will see us in the next number of months getting the message out on welfare, so people know that directionally we are going the right way.

“The industry will know that we take care. If you look at the industry and go to a race meeting, see the way horses are turned out and the appreciation that the stable staff have for their charges; it’s just fantastic. You need that carried through. To me it’s a big item as we go forward.”

Hartery as owner and breeder

Together with his wife Catherine, Nicky Hartery owns Caherass Stud in Croom, Co Limerick. He has enjoyed success as an owner and breeder and the best horse the stud has produced is Margot Did. This Group 1 Nunthorpe Stakes winning daughter of Exceed And Excel is now a broodmare in Japan and her first foal is the Group 2 winner and Grade 1 runner-up Mission Impassible, by Galileo.

His interest in horses stemmed from his mother’s side of the family. “My grandfather worked with the Widgers in Waterford. We were farmers in Kilbarry and very much into milk and corn. The Halleys were up the road from us. Horses were tangential to what we were doing.”

Margot Did and Hayley Turner winning the Group 1 Coolmore Nunthorpe Stakes \ Healy Racing

Caherass has a long and colourful history, even being a hotel at one time, and many good horses were bred there in times past. Nicky and Catherine bought the property in 1985. However, developing the place was put on hold until about 2000 due to Nicky’s travelling the world with his work. Caherass stands on 220 acres, while another farm in Patrickswell comprises 200 acres, and this was Fort Etna, formerly the home of Delma Harty.

In July 2018 Nicky Hartery addressed an Oireachtas committee and said: “My family and I put down roots in Limerick and my farm near Croom remains my pride and joy.

“I have had an interest in horses all my life, and my passion is in that farm in Limerick where I breed thoroughbreds; some I keep to race and some I send to the sales.”

Nicky has horses in training in Ireland, England and France and probably the best to carry his colours was Nick’s Nikita, a Group 3 winner when trained by Michael Halford.

As a breeder he tends to look at producing speed, commercially selling colts and retaining fillies to race.

Nick's Nikia and Rory Cleary winning the Group 3 Kerry Group Noblesse Stakes at Cork in the colours of Nicky Hartry \ Healy Racing

Factfile

Nicky Hartery is chair of CRH, the leading diversified building materials business in the world, employing 90,000 people at 3,700 locations worldwide. A Fortune 500 company, CRH is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index, the EURO STOXX 50 index, the ISEQ 20 and the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) Europe. He was appointed to the board is 2004.

He was vice-president of manufacturing and business for Dell Inc.’s Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) operations from 2000 to 2008. Prior to joining Dell, he was executive vice president at Eastman Kodak and previously held the position of president and CEO at Verbatim Corporation, based in the US.

He is currently a non-executive director of Finning International, Inc., the world’s largest Caterpillar equipment dealer, chief executive of Prodigium, a consulting company which provides business advisory services; non-executive chairman of Musgrave Group plc, a privately-owned international food retailer, and chair of Horse Racing Ireland.