IF anything was to remind you of the primacy of the horse in Ireland, and its central role in rural life, it is a recollection of the practice of draught stallions being ferried around from village to village at the back of pony-drawn carts, to provide their services to broodmare owners behind the local pub.

James Flood was a man with horse blood in his veins, and he was one of those travelling salesman of yore, a purveyor of equine genetics. He would never have dreamed that stallions, even of the thoroughbred variety, would in time be shuttled between hemispheres as part of a billion dollar industry.