Upstairs Downstairs

The black and white bottom line is that Saturday's Dubai Duty Free Irish Derby pulled a crowd of 11,957. That's less than half the official attendance returned just four years ago. On the face of it, after an €81 million revamp - €36 million of which was state money - that's a dire outcome on an occasion the redevelopment was mostly designed for. Curiously though it didn't feel that bad.

There was bad stuff on Saturday. Paying €35 to get in and then having to endure a long queue to go to the toilet is ridiculous. Having to queue even longer to get a drink is the same. There were tales of no toilet paper in the gents, restaurants running out of food and bottled water selling out on what was a warm day.

Racing officials tend not to like focussing on blunt instruments such a crowd figures, preferring instead to talk about the racegoer experience being good enough to encourage a return visit. Paying through the nose in order to stand in a queue is not something that would have most of us rushing back.

All this occurred on the ground floor. Those Upstairs probably didn't have to worry about such Downstairs trifles. It might be an unfair characterisation but as a Derby field almost entirely owned by Curragh shareholders swept by there was still at least some sense of a cosy aristocracy letting the peasants queue for their cake.

The logistics were bad enough to have some racegoers being grateful for the Derby crowd being only just over one third of the new Curragh's 30,000 capacity. Patience may have been tested too far if circumstances had come anyway close to the modern day Derby record crowd of 31,144.

That was when Grey Swallow won. 2015 was the year Jack Hobbs won. These are what the lavish new Curragh complex was being compared to in terms of attendance. Some of us were present for those and other Derbies at the unloved and mostly decrepit old facility. And while talk of 'feel' and 'vibe' is hopelessly intangible it really didn't feel like there were only half the crowds on Saturday.

After a needless kerfuffle raised over failure to release specific attendances for each day at the Guineas festival, good sense was applied to straight-forwardly reporting the Derby figures. 2,859 were at Thursday evening's fixture. Friday's Group One Pretty Polly card got 3,661. On top of Derby day barely exceeding a third of capacity they make for pretty grim reading.

Putting it in a context of long-term goals, or the short-term context of a clash with a GAA game in nearby Newbridge, can be balanced out by glorious weather and a certain novelty value. These are disappointing crowd figures by any measure. And the not unreasonable desire for many people is to find reasons why.

Many will be floated, such as customers left disenchanted at effectively being asked to stay away during two years of construction. Or the Friday timing of a Group One card being a discouragement. Maybe even the competition element will provoke unrealistic calls for artificial measures to be taken to curtail the power of Coolmore-Ballydoyle.

All of it is mostly a case of treating symptoms rather than addressing the core element in attendance levels which is that quality racing alone simply doesn't seem to be enough. If it was, then the richest race of the year, featuring some of the best three year olds in the world, would have the Curragh packed.

An attendance of less than 12,000 in the circumstances of the biggest capital development project in Irish racing history is disappointing in terms of the sport's overall spectator reach. The Curragh management will no doubt get it in the neck as a result but there's an element of symptom chasing there too because the reality is that it is 'event' fixtures that pull crowds in Ireland.

Festivals like Galway and Listowel are such events with the quality of racing irrelevant for most coming through the gates. There's no coincidence either that it is the concluding 'Family Day' at Punchestown which is the busiest day of the year. Boosting the Irish Derby's 'event' status will be crucial to its long-term future in terms of general public appeal.

That represents a real challenge, as the jargon goes. But the good news is that some of the mundane elements that impacted on Saturday's event look easily fixable. It's the bigger picture stuff that will be the real issue.

Earlier this year the BHA boss Nick Rust got some heat for talking about racing's 'social licence' with a general public that many critics quickly pointed out know little about racing and often care even less.

Subsequent BHA welfare steps - particularly over pulling up tired horses at the Cheltenham festival - prompted reflex defensiveness which basically boiled down to inviting the public to eff off if they don't understand or like the game.

Flippantly dismissing the concept of a sport's credibility - especially an animal based sport - and how it is rooted in widespread public acceptance of suitable standards being in place seemed off-beam at the time, reeking of a smug 'we know best' attitude that trivialized supposedly airy-fairy talk of public contracts.

Well it might be an intangible concept, but if you want to see a sport's social licence starting to shred before your eyes then examine greyhound racing's current situation on the back of RTE's Prime Time Investigates programme last week.

Some within the dog game have claimed the portrayal of a state-subsidised greyhound industry as being cruelly exploitative lacks context. It's also plausible to argue the programme presented a manipulatively sentimental picture at times.

But there's no escaping how disgusting the images of animal cruelty were. The greyhound authorities also can't escape how their regulation of an over-producing industry can come across as more of a bureaucratic box-ticking exercise rather than any serious attempt to police those prepared to exploit helpless animals.

Certainly no expertise was required to feel deep unease at what a small minority of people are prepared to do to either make or save money. And those charged with keeping them in check can't rely on any 'we know best' position in a scenario where the long-term sustainability of the sport must be in question.

That was made clear yesterday when the Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, outlined how greyhound racing must move to a focus on welfare rather than production if it is to continue to receive state money from the Horse & Greyhound Fund.

Interestingly he also said he believed falling attendances at greyhound racing was inextricably linked with public perception of the sport. Without that, the support of middle Ireland would wither away he argued.

What it all highlights is how vital identification and traceability are when it comes to welfare. In recent times racing hasn't been immune either to disgraceful pictures of cruelty in relation to thoroughbreds.

Much needed steps are being taken, including the 30 day foal notification system introduced in the Spring as part of the Industry Wide Policy on Prohibited Substances & Doping Control. That was finally approved last summer, a full two and a half years after an Anti-Doping Task Force report issued at the start of 2016.

It's delays of that sort, with sectional interests focussing on their own patch rather than the overall picture, which can dangerously weaken public confidence about racing keeping its side of a contract that requires it to carry out, and be seen to carry out, everything that's right and proper in terms of welfare. It's an intangible contract but it is one that is fundamental to racing's long-term future.