On the last Monday of July each year upwards of 100,000 people descend on Ballybrit in Galway for what is one of Ireland’s most popular racing festivals, writes Seán Creedon

 

‘‘As I rode down to Galway town to seek for recreation
On the seventeenth of August me mind being elevated
There were multitudes assembled with their tickets at the station
Me eyes began to dazzle and I’m goin’ to see the races.
With your whack-fa-the-da-for-the-diddle-ee-iddle-day.’’

The opening lines of a traditional Irish song about the Galway Races which was made famous by the Dubliners in the sixties and later recorded by several other artists.
Records of organised race meetings in County Galway go back to the mid thirteenth century, when what were known as horse matches were run under King’s Plate Articles.

In 1864 there was a five-day race meeting at Knockbarron near Loughrea; and exactly 100 years later a Western Plate was confined to “gentlemen riders’’ qualified for National Hunt Races at Punchestown or members of the County Galway Hunt.

The opening day at Ballybrit was on Tuesday, August 17, 1869, when contemporary records show that 40,000 people turned up to watch the racing and Absentee was the first winner of the Galway Plate.
At that time the Liberals were in Government and William Gladstone was Prime Minister of Great Britain and Ireland. The previous year Irish horse racing received a boost when the Prince of Wales went racing at Punchestown during his state visit to Ireland

For that first day at Ballybrit, Eyre Square was used as a camping site for the huge crowds that arrived in the town well in advance of the two-day race meeting.

The Chairman of the Stewards at the inaugural Ballybrit meeting was Lord St. Lawrence, then M.P. for Galway and the man given most of the credit for creating Punchestown.
Captain Wilson Lynch of Renmore gave the land at Ballybrit free of charge and the racecourse, measuring one and a half miles, was laid out by Thomas G. Waters, a civil engineer.

The Midland and Great Western Railway agreed to carry all horses to and from the course free of charge provided they had run in a race, a great concession and a sure encouragement to entrants.

Special trains came to Galway from all over the country and the Lough Corrib Steam Navigation Company ran a special service from Cong for the two days racing.

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own