Thirty years ago last week, Shergar was kidnapped from Ballymany Stud. It was a sensation. He was the greatest racehorse of his era, having won the Epsom Derby by a record ten lengths. He was retired to stud at three years of age, the lucky bastard. He was worth vastly more at stud than as a winner and had produced three dozen foals by the time a van and horsebox pulled up in the Stud yard.

Shergar had every reason to feel aggrieved. He was about to launch into his second season at stud, this time with 55 mares lined up. But being deprived of these pleasures was the least of his troubles. For a start, eight hours passed before anyone told the Gardai that he had been kidnapped. The groom called the stud manager, who called the vet, who called a racing friend named Sean Berry, who called a politician he knew…
This politician was none other than Alan Dukes, who was then Minister for Finance and preparing to present the Budget on the next day. Not a good moment to catch him, you might say, so he gave Berry the number of a colleague, the Minister for Justice Michael Noonan.
It’s one of those strange Irish circuits of fate that thirty years later, almost to the day, it was Noonan who, as Minister for Finance, relieved Dukes of his responsibilities as chair of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, the successor to the unloved Anglo-Irish Bank.
That was after two days of positively Shakespearean intrigue over the Anglo promissory note, worth 32 billion euro. So secretive were the negotiations that Dukes knew zilch about it beforehand. He wasn’t the only one.
Whatever you think of the actual deal, keeping it under wraps as they did was an incredible coup for the Government. A lot of naysayers had to choke on their words. That must have felt good…
The meeja hardly knew what to think. A lot of noses were out of joint, especially the ones that spend a lot of time stuck in other people’s business. Basically, they couldn’t believe that this had happened and they hadn’t even got a sniff. They’re not used to that.
I mean, in the case of Clare Daly they got and happily printed or broadcast the news that she had been arrested for drink driving, right? But then, hot on the heels of the news of the Government’s revelation of the secret resolution of the promissory note came news that Daly hadn’t in fact been over the limit at all. Far from it, in fact…
Oh dear. Something smells and Daly has, quite rightly, turned to the Garda Ombudsman. It’s not just to investigate her treatment when arrested – troubling as it is that she was handcuffed in a way that was entirely unnecessary. It’s also about how the news of her arrest made it into the meeja in the first place.
So, the press heard about Daly, where there was no story, and didn’t hear about the deal, where there was one.
The other monster story that’s been unfolding over the past two weeks, the horsemeat scandal, wasn’t revealed by Woodward and Bernstein newshounding either. Nope, it came about from diligent public servants chasing up dull and routine scientific tests. That’s right, the same public servants who have been favoured whipping posts for many in the meeja over the past three years.
It started with traces of DNA. We were reassured that this could be from fragments in the air. Then there was a burger – from a firm owned by Larry Goodman. You don’t need me to tell you that Goodman has history in the Irish beef industry going back, yes to the early 80s, a history that was closely examined in the first of the great modern Irish saga tribunals.
It’s now turned into a European scandal that the Irish – to their great credit – didn’t shirk from confronting. Horse lasagne? This one will run and run. We’ve no idea where it will end, but maybe with the newshounds belatedly on the case it’ll be chased and chased till it can run no more.
Hopefully, someone will find the source of the horsemeat that has been galloping through the food chain unbeknownst to everyone. If so, it’ll be a better result than Shergar got. He was never seen again.
The search back then was led by Superintendent Jim “Spud” Murphy. It’s said that the police searched every possible stable, farm building, shack and outbuilding in the country but all to no avail. Murphy told an interviewer “one thing we haven’t got is a clue.” Too true.
Nobody knows what happened to Shergar. He entered a kind of Lord Lucan mythscape. Most people believe that he was kidnapped by the IRA – and that when it became clear that a ransom would not be paid, they killed him with a machine gun.
And then? Well, the accepted story is that he was buried in a lime pit in Ballinamore in Co Leitrim. But at the time there was another story that did the rounds as well. That he was chopped up and disposed of in a meat factory…
It couldn’t have happened. Could it?