WATERFORD men Tom McCarthy and Michael Veale have been involved with horses together for a long time. They know each other twice as long. “50 years,” Veale proclaims, “I spent 20 years in South Africa and when I came back home, I wasn’t coming back to anything really so I said to Tom, ‘we’ll go into the horses together.’”

“That was around the mid 1990s,” McCarthy says, “But I think it was the other way around, I was the one who decided we’d go into the horses!”