WHILE the immediate effect of Gigginstown’s exit from Irish racing won’t be felt by some of those directly involved for a period of time, that is not the case for Dot Love and Ciaran Murphy, whose pre-training centre in Charlestown Stud, Co Westmeath, is a vital cog in the Gigginstown operation.

“I suppose it came as a shock to myself and Dot, we weren’t expecting it,” Murphy told The Irish Field. “We’ve been working with Michael and Eddie for 19 years and I suppose we didn’t think it was going to come to an end.

“But we have absolutely no gripes, and not a cross word to say. Gigginstown have been top-class to work for. They are the main reason we’ve been able to invest into the facilities here and learn and improve every year. “The experience we’ve obtained from the relationship has been huge for us.”

Gigginstown usually send around 50 young horses to begin their careers at Charlestown, with “eight or 10” also coming in at other times of the year for rehabilitation work.

Don Cossack, War Of Attrition and No More Heroes were all broken and pre-trained at Charlestown, and it even played a significant hand in the career of Tiger Roll, who was sent to them to do his initial training over banks.

“Gigginstown put a lot of faith in us and the feedback we got every year was very positive. We had the best job in racing but we never took it for granted. We were always looking to improve and re-invest back into our facilities.

“Eddie is top-class to deal with. If a horse got injured, or something went wrong, he would completely understand the situation. I can’t speak highly enough of both him and Michael.”

As part of Horse Racing Ireland’s National Racehorse Trainer Open Morning, Charlestown Stud will be open to the public this morning [Saturday] and Murphy is expecting a big crowd.

He added: “We’re looking forward to hosting a decent crowd on Saturday morning and we’ve had huge interest already.

“Looking to the future, we’ve built things up on the training side of things so we’d be hoping to keep moving that forward. And we’re always open for business for pre-training, breaking and schooling.”

MOUSE MORRIS

Mouse Morris enjoyed many big days training horses for Gigginstown, most notably when training Rule The World and Rogue Angel to win the Grand National and Irish Grand National in 2016.

In a change of policy last season, Gigginstown only sent Morris younger horses, most of them for point-to-points, while moving Rogue Angel and other older horses out of his care.

Reflecting on this week’s news, Morris said: “It won’t make much of a difference to me as a trainer. We had some great days with Gigginstown and we’ll take them to the grave.

“Mostly, I think it’s a pity for the Irish racing scene that a lot of the good horses will likely end up in England now.”