THE Irish Horse World surely needs a journalist/reporter solely dedicated to issues surrounding Horse Sport Ireland and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine so often, and so numerous, were the news stories/press releases about/from both organisations during 2022.

Apart from announcements about the high performance team managers in all age groups in eventing and show jumping (other than the senior event team), January was a relatively quiet month until Saturday the 22nd when the top news story was headlined ‘Alison Corbally departs Horse Sport Ireland’.

On February 19th the main story appeared under the title ‘HSI tackling 1,200 delayed passports’ while in the first half of the year other headlines were ‘TAMS II equine funding raised’ (April 16th), ‘Greenogue plans raised again in Dáil’ (May 7th), ‘HSI investigation finds no wrongdoing’ (May 14th), ‘McConalogue defends HSI over passports issues’ (May 21st), ‘Rumours of massive legal costs are not true – Duggan’ (June 4th), ‘HSI appoints Sonja Egan as head of breeding’ and ‘Minister warns over false info on equine forms’ (June 18th) plus ‘€2m available under breeder schemes’ and ’55 shows benefit from €500,000 funding’ (June 25th).

‘HSI Greenogue dream ends’ was the headline which caught the eye on July 9th while two did so the following Saturday, ‘Over €2m Covid aid kept industry afloat’ and ‘IFA ramps up TAMS equine lobbying’. The latter campaign seemingly worked, according to Judith Faherty on July 23rd, ‘Equine included in next TAMS, Minister confirms’.

In an extra news page on August 6th, IHW editor Isabel Hurley’s article on a Dáil matter was headlined ‘McGuinness raises HSI funding and staff levels’ while a piece she wrote the following Saturday appeared under ‘HSI report aims to unlock TAMS funding’.

And there were more positive funding headlines on September 10th although the first concerned monies from the Department for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, ‘Over €1m boost for Grennan College’ and ‘HSI Level 1 coaching course now open’.

Controversy

It was negative November however – ‘Legal costs of over €700,000 at HSI’ (5th), ‘Debacle at HSI as two board members resign’ (12th) and then, on November 19th, there were nearly two pages of HSI news including ‘New regime in place at HSI, ‘Reynolds steps down as HSI chairman’, ‘SJI withholds funds from HSI’, ‘Huge severance payouts at HSI’.

There was also the related statement from the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Charlie McConalogue TD (FF), under the heading ‘This is a strong team’ followed by, from the same Minister on December 10th, ‘No hold on HSI funding’.

While extremely important in its own right, the headline ‘DAFM set to approve e-passports for equines’ (December 17th) could nearly be considered light relief towards the end of the year.