'Tradition' is the watchword as punters try to explain the attraction of the National Coursing Meeting to Kathy Sheridan in Clonmel
Raffle tickets for the "bitch sapling" are changing hands at a tenner a pop. It's a fundraiser for the Nenagh and District Coursing Club and they've already sold 1,000 tickets.
"It's not bad - but she cost €2,500 to buy," says Paul Hogan, nodding towards a picture of the prize "bitch sapling", a baleful-looking greyhound.
"All that money for a dog?" I gasp, still reeling from the €25 admission fee (plus a fiver for the Club Stand).
"For a bitch, a bitch," he whispers emphatically, lest this woeful ignorance be exposed. In Clonmel, never talk about greyhounds; it's either a bitch or a dog.
Nearby, glaring from the back of a van, four falcons, their hooded, sinister little heads swivelling edgily, are perched beside a rifle attached to an enormous silencer. Any bird with a flight plan across Powerstown Park racecourse today had better reconsider.
"The idea is to scare the crows, not kill them," insists Tom Clancy, whose bird-control armoury can normally be found around Baldonnel airfield.
Across from the chip van - "servicing the sporting world" - Shay O'Callaghan and the Showtime Band are belting out Ring of Fire, as a jolly woman in a big black hat and cape embarks on what one rugged little Kerry man calls a "jitterbug".
In the paddock, it's doggy-sales heaven, offering everything from doggy treadmills to doggy creatine ("creating the power"), to vast cartons of doggy vitamins, to some fairly gruesome porcelain representations of dogs/bitches in flight.
Three days of hard drinking, gambling and doggy talk have left a swathe of suffering humans eyeing up the creatine for themselves, says one aficionado from Limerick: "Clonmel in coursing week is an open-air asylum - the only one in Europe. It attracts every mad hoor you can find in Scotland, England, Northern Ireland and America."
Sweden too. Lars and Anita Wicander from Stockholm are here for what they call "poetry in motion", the "competition between two fully fit, fully trained, moving dogs".
Tradition is a much-used word here. The Irish Coursing Club (ICC) was founded in Clonmel in 1916 and this is the 81st Clonmel meeting. Generations of men and women have passed on the coursing gene. The chairman of South Tipperary County Council, Derry Foley (Fine Gael), and the Mayor of Clonmel, Niall Dennehy (Fianna Fáil), are here, dangling their official chains and the word "tradition" and saying they've "never heard a word of dissent". The mayoral chain incorporates two greyhounds. Declan Byrne, of the local chamber of commerce, says it got 12 letters from opponents of coursing last year and none this year.
The event is reckoned to be worth €16 million to the local economy. In bars and restaurants around the town, "coursing menus" are on offer with the hot whiskeys and Bulmers, while the day's coursing is replayed interminably on video. Late into the night, hundreds of thousands of euro are gambled away in high-stakes poker games in much-coveted local lodgings.
As the coursing continues, the crowds part to make way for a flat-bedded buggy/doggy ambulance bearing a sorry-looking dog/bitch lying prone in a blanket. There's no sign of a hare ambulance. It's half-time and the urbane Jerry Desmond, chief executive of the ICC, says that three hares out of about 30 coursed so far have been "knocked about . . . But the vets looked at them and were happy". As for the hares that shoot into base, physically unscathed, they "relax immediately", he says reassuringly, "and start this thing with their paws as though washing their faces".
That sounds so sweet. Could we have a look?
"No," Desmond says baldly. Oh? Well, these are "wild creatures", he explains, and might react badly to someone they haven't seen before. Hello?
UP IN THE bar above the Club Stand, in what sounds like a clip from EastEnders, Vinnie Jones, hard man and reigning icon of Irish coursing, is chattering about some "fockin' owsome" trout-fishing on the River Test, while his mate ponders the chances of getting a quick bag of chips on the way to the "mo-hor" in the car-park. They're en route to the opening of Stringfellows, apparently.
Niall Quinn has been and gone in recent days, and socialised exhaustively by all accounts, but in the PR stakes he is no Vinnie. Jones is the one who had the "sheer bottle to stand up in the media" and say he was coming to the event, says Ronan Gorman, the chief executive and one of five full-time employees of the Countryside Alliance Ireland (CAI), to a big cheer during the presentations.
In truth, not much bottle was required. No protesters showed up, it's a notably good-humoured crowd, and champion piper Tom Doyle's rendition of Amhrán na bhFiann, traditionally played before the finals, has a calming effect (useful when you stand to win about €33,000 on a bet, as a nearby quartet actually did).
Anyway, if things had turned rowdy, Jones had an astounding number of compatriots in attendance, to judge by the accents. The organisers tend not to highlight the many British fans fleeing to Ireland for their sport since last year's coursing ban there, but Darren Reed, from Doncaster, says happily that 50 people from his club alone have made the three-day trip to Clonmel.
"Since the ban, you'll find the English coming over four to five times a year rather than once," he says. Bitter doggy men from the North pour vitriol on "direct rule" ministers who have effectively banned the sport by withdrawing the licence to net hares.
Reed, who hit the bar early in the day, describes how they've got around the ban in England by semantics, following legal advice. So the word coursing becomes "field trialling", coursing field becomes "flushing" field, a slipper is a "releaser" and they have three judges instead of just the one.
"We put muzzles on them now, that's the only difference," he adds, almost as an afterthought. Big difference, say several Irish fans, notably lacking in sympathy for their British brethren. If they had been willing to introduce muzzles like the Irish did a few years ago, there would be no ban, they reckon. The view is that muzzling, in use here for 13 years, has proved its worth in terms of easing the public pressure on coursing.
"The kill has been taken out of Irish coursing," asserts Desmond. Really? Well, it's only a fraction of 1 per cent, he says. "Before muzzling, it was only 5 per cent [ see panel below]."
The Irish Council Against Blood Sports (ICABS) has not changed its stance.
"Hares are getting mauled and injured and left to die", says Aideen Yourell. "The cruelty starts with taking them out of their natural habitat, keeping them in compounds, using them as a lure in front of two greyhounds."
Last year, ICABS met the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, and showed him footage of hares "being mauled" and then of "the humane alternative" used in Australia, where mechanical lures are used.
"He looked at us and thanked us very much," says Yourell.
LEAVING THE RACECOURSE, we encounter a Dublin businessman, who happened to be in the area and was curious.
"I was expecting something much nastier . . . but I couldn't see much to get worked up about," he says. "It's the grassroots of rural Ireland on their big day out. They're close to nature whether you like it or not and there are skills there that you'd have to admire. You can't sanitise everything out of existence."
A three-card trick man was plying his furtive trade in the car-park.
"Keep walkin', you just keep walkin'," threatened a woman, as her husband paused hopefully for one last flutter, before joining the two-mile tailback to sanity.