Barney’s your only man for a dead cert on the gee-gees

Country Living with Francis Farragher

One really knows that there is something different about Galway when the sun rises in that last Monday of July and the normal rush hour traffic is replaced by snarl-ups coinciding with the beginning and ending of the race meetings at Ballybrit. There was a strange kind of feel about driving through Claregalway around 8am on Monday morning and not realising that there was no traffic around until I was about a mile through the village.

Nearly everyone seems to take holidays during Race Week in Galway apart from Gardai, ambulance drivers, hotel and restaurant employees as well as the odd journalist here and there bashing out a column for the week that’s in it. It’s always been a week for the great gambles and betting coups that have reputedly landed fortunes for various syndicates, but invariably – like 99% of the normal population – I tend to hear of those ‘strokes’ in the past tense rather than the present or future.

I can remember the tension as a child when my father led an exodus from the hayfield to a neighbour’s house back in the late 1960s, to track the fortunes of a horse with the name of Bar Lough, one of his three annual bets [the others being the Grand National and the Derby], and cheering him on as he led the field with three fences to go.

Alas and alack, like so many great tips, just when he seemed poised to pull away for home, he caught the hedging and came tumbling down, putting paid to our hopes of a lemonade and chocolate treat from the winnings.

Tales of tips from Galway are legendary but a few years back when I took stock of advice that had been given to me on the morning of The Plate, I had ended up nearly getting some kind of recommendation for every horse in the race. Dead certs in racing, or in sport generally, really don’t exist and a decade or so when at last I got on the ‘inside track’ on a ‘cannot lose’ horse at one of the English meetings, I managed to get a €100 on the nag at 9/1.

In the minutes before the off, he had come back into evens, but as I prided myself on getting the money on early, it all ended in tears when he finished eighth out of eight.

Apparently he had burst a blood vessel as he left the stalls, leaving an array of punters with empty pockets for the rest of the week. There were also some serious individual ‘dead-cert’ bets on Mayo to, both beat Galway in the Connacht semi-fina,l and then to go on and win the provincial championship. Last Spring it seemed a safe enough investment but look how it turned out.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.