Race with the devil

Comedian Ed Byrne likes to describe his northside Dublin background as upper working class/lower middle class. “That is to say,” he clarifies, “we were neither rich enough nor poor enough to own a horse.”

The gag neatly highlights the ubiquity of the horse in Irish life, from lush, rolling stud farms to cobblestoned inner city markets. And in between are the hundreds of thousands of people whose engagement with horseflesh ranges from a lifetime’s professional involvement to the occasional nibble at the bookies.

David Donohue belongs to the more committed end of the spectrum. hotpress readers may know him primarily as a songwriter, musician and film-maker, whose credits include three albums by The Floors and the documentaries Put Blood In The Music, about the New York underground scene, and Words For The Dying, featuring John Cale and Brian Eno. He has also directed filming of U2 and Gavin Friday and worked as music supervisor on a number of movie and television projects, including the RTE series From A Whisper To A Scream.

His latest project, however, returns him to his first love – the world of horse racing. The Carlow-born 40 year old is the man behind Turf Wars, a six-part documentary series which had its first airing on BBC 2 last Friday. RTE will broadcast the series as Saddle Soap in the autumn.

Produced by Independent Pictures and directed by Karen Rodgers, Turf Wars charts a critical six month period in the life of trainer Jessica Harrington’s racing stable in Co. Kildare.

“It covers all aspects of the racing game,” says series creator Donohue. “What I love about racing is the gambling, the excitement of horses going head to head and the whole uncertainty of the thing. And all that is there. But it’s also very much about the characters, especially Jessica herself. What’s special for her is that she’s got a very good horse, Moscow Flyer, who takes on Istabraq at Leopardstown three times. Istabraq is a history-making horse and it was a huge thing for Jessica to have a horse good enough to take him on.”

The original plan for the documentary was to track Harrington’s progress to the year’s traditional national hunt climax at Cheltenham. But with five programmes’ worth of filming already in the can, potential disaster for all concerned struck in the form of the foot and mouth outbreak.

“When Foot and Mouth happened we were all frozen to the spot because, essentially, it looked like racing for the season was finished,” David recalls. “We weren’t sure what was going to happen next or even if we’d have anything else to film. But, as it happened, it provided an incredibly dramatic and emotional twist to the documentary. Because it really just gutted people. For all the people involved, their life revolves around the excitement of Cheltenham – you could almost say that it’s a huge spiritual experience.”

And, of course, it wasn’t just one festival or one small screen enterprise that was threatened; the bigger picture looked even more ominous.

“Even looking back on it now, it was an incredible catastrophe,” says Donohue. “Nobody knew how long it was going to last, nobody knew how many jobs would be lost, nobody knew the full implications for the industry. People were ploughing through their day to day work in a severe depressive slump. And we were able to document the trainer and the yard working their way through all that extraordinary uncertainty.”

And while Cheltenham did eventually succumb to the plague, ultimately Turf Wars didn’t lack for a sensational denouement. “We have an extraordinary climax based on racing resuming in Ireland and there being another opportunity for these two great horses to take each other on,” says David. And if you don’t already know what happened, the advice is to stay tuned until the final episode.

While David Donohue concluded filming with an even deeper respect and admiration for Jessica Harrington than he’d had starting out, he also developed a particular affection for some of the more peripheral characters involved. Like Fr. Breen, “the racing priest”, who says that his belief in the existence of God is confirmed by his appointment to a parish containing three race courses and who likes to give tips from the pulpit at Christmas time. And there’s Milo, a Polish jockey learning his trade in Kildare, whose ambition is to ride in a race so that he can send photos and videos home to his family.

In the case of David Donohue, you get the sense that it was all a labour of love for a guy who was born two hours after the 1961 Grand National (“my mother used to say that she was going over the fences with the horses”) and who once planned a career in stud management before art college and rock ‘n’ roll intervened to take him in another direction.

But he never lost his passion for horse-racing and, while music and film still take up much of his time, he feels he has not quite exhausted the subject yet.

“I really want to do a horse racing feature,” he says. When people see this documentary they’ll see that, first, you could make a really good soap set in the horse racing world. But better still you could go and make a really good feature film. It’s part of the fabric of Irish society, horse racing, and more than other sport it’s one we excel at. Soccer, for example, would be way down the list by comparison to what we achieve in horse racing. How we punch above our weight is really quite extraordinary.

“The characters, the stories and the history are all here – there’s a great book to be written but I also think there’s a great feature film to be made. And I’m hoping to have a crack at

that.”

"Turf Wars" is on BBC 2 on Fridays at 7.30pm. The series will be screened as "Saddle Soap" by RTE in autumn 2001