It started with a doping scandal, a documentary error and a convoy of cars driving up to inspect the Co Wexford stables of respected horse trainer Liz Doyle, daughter of former Fine Gael junior minister and MEP, Avril Doyle.

The random search on March 26, 2014 was jointly led by Chris Gordon, head of security at the Turf Club, which regulated the sport, and the Special Investigations Unit of the Department of Agriculture. 

Nothing untoward was found. Liz Doyle had done no wrong. 

But what unfolded that day, and in the weeks that followed, would ricochet around the world of horse racing for years, souring relations between the watchdog and industry players. 

Gordon was accused of trying to entrap Doyle – a claim he fulsomely denied – with a copy of a lodgment docket allegedly linking her to John Hughes, a vet criminally convicted for possessing commercial quantities of anabolic steroids. While the security chief insisted it was all just a mix-up, the row could not be put to bed.

On one side were the Doyles and the senior officials of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association (IRTA), on the other were members of the Turf Club. Even elite trainers like Dermot Weld and Gordon Elliott were drawn into the dispute.

Each, in turn, would be called to give evidence in the High Court as Gordon sued the IRTA claiming he was the victim of an orchestrated, malicious, defamation campaign – the aim of which, he alleged, was to oust him from his job.

“The stakes are so high for my reputation, for Mr Gordon’s reputation, for everybody’s reputation,” Liz Doyle told the jury when the case went to trial last February.

Represented by Sean Costello solicitors and barristers Thomas Hogan, Mark Harty and Shane English, a vindicated Gordon walked out of court with €300,000. 

This three-part story explains how a seemingly small mistake led to a breakdown in trust between two august institutions, a seven-week trial and a six-figure damages payout.

An unblemished career

For anyone familiar with the world of horse racing, the Turf Club needs no introduction. With an old and distinguished history dating back to 1755, it was the private body that regulated the industry up until the end of 2017 when it became the Irish Horse Racing Regulatory Board. The main events documented here took place in 2014 and 2015, before that name change occurred.

Chris Gordon started working as head of security for the Turf Club in 2010, after a 30-year-long career in An Garda Síochána. Raised in Dublin, the father of two joined the force as a young man in the late 1970s and was first posted to Store Street in the inner city, which was then in the grip of a heroin epidemic. Street crime was rife. When an internal opportunity arose to study Commerce at UCD, Gordon took it, paving the way for a long and varied garda career, often, but not always, in posts away from the coalface of policing. He spent time in charge of training at Templemore garda college; he ran the office of the Deputy Commissioner; he even spent a year on secondment to the United Nations in Cyprus. 

Horse racing, however, was always a hobby and a passion. When the Turf Club job came along, he took early retirement from the force at the age of 50, having risen to the rank of superintendent. 

As Head of Security, Gordon’s role involved policing every aspect of the rules of racing from betting irregularities to stable yard security, and ensuring horses were not given illegal performance-enhancing substances. 

All sorts of red flags might spark an investigation. A horse significantly weakening in the betting market could suggest those with knowledge unavailable to the average punter were backing it to lose – insider trading but on the racecourse rather than on the stock market.

Off the track, the job required Gordon to liaise with the Department of Agriculture, the gardaí, bookmakers and other international regulatory bodies for big calendar events like the Cheltenham festival. In court last February, Gordon described Cheltenham as being of almost Olympic importance to the sport in the UK and Ireland.  

To ensure the Turf Club would stay out front in regulating the sport, Gordon was also expected to develop policies to maintain the integrity of Irish horse racing.

And in 2012, the integrity of Irish horse racing was rocked by a doping scandal.

A doping scandal

Officials at Dublin Airport intercepted two packages containing commercial quantities (6kg) of a powerful anabolic steroid called Nitrotain destined for Carlow vet, and retired Department of Agriculture official, John Hughes. Hughes had been importing the drug from an Australian wholesaler called Nature Vet.

The same year, Department of Agriculture inspectors found unauthorised animal medicines, including Stanozolol, the steroid used by disqualified Canadian Olympic athlete Ben Johnson, at the horse training establishment run by Hughes’s brother, Pat Hughes. A further discovery of one kilogram of Nitrotain was made at the yard of the high-profile, Cheltenham winning trainer, Philip Fenton.

Leading the charge in these inspections was the Department of Agriculture’s Special Investigations Unit, which was set up in the 1980s  to combat illegal growth hormones and angel dust in the beef industry. Its remit widened over time.

In October 2013, John Hughes pleaded guilty at the District Court to possession of Nitrotain. He refused to cooperate with investigators by naming any racehorse trainers he may have supplied. His case was dismissed on its merits by a judge after he made a donation of €10,000 to Kilkenny Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and agreed to pay court costs. He was fined €4,500 and was disqualified from racing for five years by the Turf Club.

His brother Pat Hughes, the Irish Grand National and Ascot winning trainer, was fined while Fenton took a three-year ban.

The situation in the UK was just as serious. In 2013, Emirati trainer Mahmood Al Zarooni, who worked for one of the biggest owners in the world – Sheik Mohammed in the Godolphin operation – was banned from racing for eight years. Anabolic steroids were found in 22 horses he trained. A few months later another trainer, Gerald Butler, was banned for five years for similar offences.

Inevitably, questions were asked about the scale of the problem. Was it niche or was the world of racing awash with steroids? And what was being done about it?

If a trainer refused to open up a veterinary medicine cabinet for a Turf Club official during an inspection, there was precious little the regulator could do.

The Turf Club found itself in the firing line.

Hughes had imported what was described in the media as “industrial quantities” of Nitrotain. But nothing had been detected by the regulator either through testing or through stable inspections?

For some, the controversy was a wake-up call that more needed to be done to protect the reputation of the sport. 

The challenge was substantial. Anabolic steroids are untraceable in the system after 48 hours, even though the performance-enhancing effects live on, building muscle mass which allows a horse to train harder. 

Joint inspections

The trainer Liz Doyle.

Gordon, who attends about 150 race meetings a year, took a hawkish view in regards to tackling the problem. He was constantly being told the industry was far from squeaky clean: “I would be speaking to bookmakers at the track, I would liaise with them. I would be talking to racegoers. I would know lots of people, trainers, stable staff. The view was there was a problem in Irish racing and what are you doing about it in The Turf Club.”

In his role as Head of Security, Gordon made written recommendations to the chief executive of the Turf Club Denis Egan as to how they might combat the use of banned substances in horse racing. 

One of the recommendations, subsequently adopted, was to carry out surprise joint inspections of trainers’ yards with the Department of Agriculture. Together they could send out a clear message that doping would not be tolerated.

The advantage of coordinating with the Department was clear cut. Agriculture officials had wide-ranging powers of search and entry. By contrast, the Turf Club needed a trainer’s permission to come on site, rendering the regulator’s authority somewhat toothless. If a trainer refused to open up a veterinary medicine cabinet for a Turf Club official during an inspection, there was precious little the regulator could do.

But Gordon’s security team could still bring momentum and expertise to the joint enterprise. Without the input of the Turf Club, the likelihood of the Department embarking on a programme of stable yard inspections was small.

The book of evidence

To put the joint inspections scheme in motion, a meeting was held on January 22, 2014 between department officials and members of the Turf Club. At the meeting, the department shared a copy of the prosecution file in the John Hughes case with Turf Club CEO Denis Egan. The file, known as the book of evidence, included Hughes’ diary and corresponding lodgment dockets, some of which appeared to offer a record of individuals Hughes may have supplied with contraband, making it a potentially useful tool in determining which trainers’ yards should receive a surprise visit.  

While a couple of names were directly linked to Nitrotain purchases in the records, the details on about half of the dockets were opaque. One showed a lodgment of €590. The figure was split between two payments of €390 and €200. Beside the figure of €390 was written the initials TH and beside the €200 were the letters LD. During the meeting, there was a discussion between the various officials as to who Hughes’s bank records might refer to.

Egan suggested the well-known trainer Liz Doyle for LD, as she was the only trainer licensed at the time with those initials. He then wrote her name in the margin with a question mark beside it. While his colleagues, including Gordon, saw Egan taking notes during the meeting, the fact he had written directly on to the book of evidence went unnoticed.

Egan’s copy of the book of evidence was subsequently photocopied and distributed to the Turf Club’s security team, led by Gordon and his deputy Declan Buckley.

The new regime begins

The first of over 40 joint inspections that year got underway on March 26, 2014. It was Gordon’s job to decide the schedule. Two horse trainers’ yards were visited that day without prior warning. First up was John Hanlon in Bagenalstown. Vets from the Special Investigation Unit of the Department of Agriculture did a thorough examination of the barns and outhouses. Nothing untoward was found.

The second was Liz Doyle. It was her mother, the former junior minister, MEP and Wexford TD, Avril Doyle who opened the door to the inspectors at Kitestown when they pulled up in their cars after lunch. She went to fetch her daughter outside informing her that there were some gentlemen here to see her.

He said they parted amicably and as he left, Avril Doyle told him there should be more of these inspections.

Gordon showed Liz Doyle a letter of introduction from the Turf Club, a formal document he was obliged to present to request access to the training yard. Veterinary inspectors from the department, led by Louis Reardon, did not have to dispense with such formalities to gain entrance.

Gordon explained to the Doyles that the joint inspection was a new initiative aimed at deterring the use of anabolic steroids in Irish racing. Outside in the barn, while Reardon and his team were checking the veterinary medications and medicines register, Gordon asked Liz Doyle if she had any dealings with the vet, John Hughes. The answer was no. Doyle replied in fairly salty language to the effect that she despised Hughes, and that he was a horrible man.

But she said she was a friend of his brother, Pat Hughes, the trainer. Years earlier, she had ridden out horses for him three days a week, relaying information to him about their speed and wellbeing. It was a way of supplementing her income when she was starting out on her own as a trainer. By 2014, Doyle was a well-established player with several staff members and between 30 and 40 horses in her care.

Reardon gave the yard the all-clear. No irregularities were found. When Liz Doyle asked why she had been selected for an inspection, Gordon told her that her name had been found on a docket seized in the John Hughes prosecution.

By his account, Doyle immediately asked to see the document. Gordon said he held up the book of evidence to show it to her but covered up the other initials, TH, on the page where her name appeared. He recalled Avril Doyle craning her neck to have a look over his shoulder. Liz Doyle’s partner Barry Murphy was also present, as were a couple of staff members.

Liz Doyle denied the docket had anything to do with her. Gordon said he accepted her denial without hesitation and they discussed whether there might be another Liz Doyle or LD in equestrian sports. He assured her that was the end of the matter for her as far as the Turf Club was concerned. 

Avril Doyle later gave evidence that she asked permission to make a copy of the docket and that Gordon replied that there was no need as he accepted Liz’s word. The security chief denied that happened.

He said they parted amicably and as he left, Avril Doyle told him there should be more of these inspections.

An “honest mistake”

But as they walked away, Reardon pulled Gordon aside. He said he did not think the words “Liz Doyle?” had appeared on the original prosecution file. This was confirmed by Reardon when he checked the book of evidence and reverted to Gordon the following day. When Gordon contacted his boss, Denis Egan, about the matter, the chief executive admitted that he had scribbled Doyle’s name down on the page. 

From Gordon’s perspective, going to Doyle’s yard with the wrong document was unquestionably bad practice but it was an honest mistake he was happy to acknowledge. 

Little did he know the repercussions to come.

Liz Doyle had begun to do her own detective work. The Turf Club officials had barely left her yard at Kitestown, when she put in a call to her old friend and boss, Pat Hughes. While she had no issue with the fact she had been inspected, her name on the lodgment docket rankled. “I knew there was something wrong for two reasons; number one, I didn’t get on with John Hughes at all. There was no way he would have my name on one of his documents. There is just no way,” Doyle would explain in court. She also felt that if her name really had appeared on a Department of Agriculture prosecution document, someone would have been in touch with her far earlier.

Pat Hughes was able to confirm in about half an hour that her name was not on the book of evidence in his brother’s case. He then emailed her a copy of the original John Hughes bank slip. Liz Doyle’s name was nowhere to be seen on the document.  It was immediately clear to her that this was not what she had been shown during the inspection.

She said the first thing that came into her head was who had switched it, was it the Department of Agriculture or was it the Turf Club? Who had tried to do this? Her mother recalled that they sat down at the kitchen table and discussed the differences between the two documents.

An amicable encounter with Declan Buckley

On March 30, Doyle approached Declan Buckley, the Turf Club’s deputy head of security, at a race meeting in Limerick. Buckley, like Gordon, was an ex-garda who had taken early retirement in 2012. As a detective inspector in the force, he had specialised in forensics, and was in charge of gathering fingerprint evidence in major criminal investigations. 

Face to face with Buckley, Doyle confronted him about the discrepancy in the bank lodgment docket. It was an amicable encounter.

Buckley was surprised to hear what had happened and promised Doyle he would look into it. On April 2, 2014 he informed her over the phone that a member of the Turf Club had written on the document. He did not name the chief executive Denis Egan as the person responsible. In hindsight, he believed this might have been a mistake but Egan was his boss. 

By Buckley’s account, Doyle was very annoyed on the phone. She asked him for a copy of the document she had been shown in her yard and for an apology. He said he agreed to hand over the documentation but told her she would not be getting an apology because, under the regulations, the Turf Club was entitled to carry out inspections and didn’t need any reason to go into a trainer’s yard.

According to Doyle, during that conversation, Buckley agreed with her that what had happened wasn’t right, and amounted to some form of entrapment. In the meantime, her mother Avril Doyle contacted the Turf Club looking for a copy of the lodgment docket and the names of the inspectors who had attended the yard.

“She completely lost her cool. She got very, very aggressive and abusive and she snapped it out of my hand and it tore.”

Declan Buckley, deputy head of Security at the Turf Club

After the call, Buckley and Gordon discussed how to proceed. They agreed, with Egan’s approval,  that Gordon would write a letter explaining to Doyle why she had been inspected and what had gone wrong. Again, while the letter did not refer to Egan by name, it did set out that a member of the Turf Club had written her name on a copy of the prosecution file.

This letter was to be handed to her, along with the scribbled on Hughes docket which Buckley photocopied from his own copy of the book of evidence. He said it was the same as Gordon’s copy save for a circle he had put around Liz Doyle’s name prior to the inspection of her stables.

The anonymous whistleblower

Buckley was to hand these over to Doyle at a race meeting in Fairyhouse on April 6 along with a third document – a redacted copy of an anonymous letter sent by a “whistleblower” to the Turf Club months earlier accusing several high profile trainers – including Doyle – of using performance-enhancing drugs. The Department of Agriculture had received a copy of the same letter. The Turf Club and the Department would quite frequently get this type of anonymous missive. Gordon said while it couldn’t be ignored, it was treated as “soft intelligence”.

The 2013 letter would later be presented in court. The following extract gives a flavour of the allegations detailed within it. “It has come to my attention that there is widespread administering of illegal performance-enhancing substances to their racehorses. People in the horse racing fraternity know what trainers and handlers are routinely administering drugs. Nitrotain was the most common substance used a couple of years ago but now there is an illegal substance being brought in from the UK. It was developed in the labs in Oxford, the top point-to-point trainers are using this substance. It is very hard to detect as it does not show up in horses’ blood. It has distinct advantages that it allows racehorses to recover very quickly after rigorous exercise while maintaining muscle mass. The substance costs €600 for six injections to be administered over a month with one injection then after that which costs another €100 per injection. To really bring the horses to the boil on a race day they are given Hemo-15.”

Buckley packed this, along with the letter drafted by Gordon and the copy of the Hughes docket in the book of evidence, to give to Doyle.

A “tantrum” at Fairyhouse

Liz Doyle had one horse running at Fairyhouse on April 6, 2014. Just before the fifth race, Buckley spotted her entering the weigh room. He said he approached her and they had the following exchange. “I said ‘Liz, I have those documents for you’ and she said ‘what documents’. I said ‘the documents you looked for the other day’. ‘Oh, it’s just the same old thing’, she said. ‘It’s just the same old thing, I don’t want them’,” he told the High Court.

Doyle would later tell the High Court that she “realised that there was some type of cover-up happening”.

He said she then had a change of heart. The court heard she briefly looked at the copy of the Hughes document and snatched it out of his hand. 

“She completely lost her cool. She got very, very aggressive and abusive and she snapped it out of my hand and it tore, I could do nothing about it. She calmed down a few minutes later and she said ‘I thought you were a nice man but I’ve changed my mind about it now’.”

Buckley said he kept calm during this “tantrum” figuring there was no point getting into an argy-bargy with Doyle. He said she shouted and roared about how he was telling lies and how they were forging documents, which he presumed was a reference to the Turf Club security personnel.

He claimed Murphy put his finger right up to his face and said “how dare you treat Liz Doyle in the manner you treated her in the weigh room, you don’t realise the ferocious pull we have. I will ‘F’ you and the Turf Club.”

The nub of the problem was that Doyle clearly believed the document presented to her by Buckley at Fairyhouse was significantly different from the one she had been shown during the yard inspection days earlier. 

An alleged cover-up

“I could see that it in no way resembled what I was shown in my yard. There were initials introduced and there was a ‘Liz Doyle’ scribbled over to the left-hand side with a circle and a question mark behind it,” she would later claim.

When she brought the torn document back to her mother Avril Doyle, the former MEP shared her daughter’s concern that it was “quite considerably” different when compared to the docket they had been shown during the inspection.

It was a serious allegation. Liz Doyle would later tell the High Court that she “realised that there was some type of cover-up happening”.

In her version of the Fairyhouse encounter, she said she greeted Buckley very politely in the weigh room. She claimed that when he realised she knew the document he was giving her was not the same as the one shown to her in the yard, he tried to grab it back off her. In this mini tug-of-war, she said the piece of paper ripped and crumpled.

Buckley maintained this account was totally untrue. “Why would I snatch it back? I had no reason to snatch it back. This was a document I was giving to her to help her.”

William Fleming, the clerk of the scales who weighs jockeys going in and out of each race, witnessed the encounter. He said he saw Doyle snatch a document out of Buckley’s hand, not the other way around. He said there was a “crossness” in her and that her voice “became progressively temper-ish, aggressive, and at one stage abusive”. He said Buckley was “very quiet”. 

Following the set-to, Buckley remained in the weigh room. After the sixth race, he said he could see from the corner of his eye Doyle’s partner Barry Murphy coming towards him at a pace. He said he feared he was going to be assaulted but decided to keep cool and stand his ground.

He claimed Murphy put his finger right up to his face and said “how dare you treat Liz Doyle in the manner you treated her in the weigh room, you don’t realise the ferocious pull we have. I will ‘F’ you and the Turf Club”.

Buckley said after the “tirade”, he offered to talk it through with Murphy who walked away.

According to Murphy’s account, Doyle was extremely disturbed by her encounter with Buckley. He said when he later bumped into the Turf Club security official in the weigh room he told him: “You’re a disgrace, how stupid do you think you are, you are all fraudsters”. 

A new problem

That night, Buckley emailed Egan to update him on what had happened at Fairyhouse. Egan was worried. “I was very concerned at that stage that there was an allegation that a false document had been presented. Did I do anything?… I decided at that stage I would wait and see what was going to happen from the other side,” he told the court.

In the eyes of Liz Doyle, Buckley had presented her with an entirely new document – a third version of the Hughes lodgment docket.

A new front had opened up. What exactly was Doyle laying at the door of the Turf Club inspectors? Clearly something far more serious than Egan’s notetaking blunder.

While Gordon believed at all times that Liz Doyle was a victim like him – who simply wanted an apology for a wrong done to her – she would later tell the High Court of her conviction that he had allegedly tried to beef up evidence against her. The saga was only beginning.

*****

Part 2 –”We just don’t like to be treated like criminals”

The horse trainer Noel Meade

On Saturday morning, August 9, 2014, the head of security at the Turf Club Chris Gordon picked up the newspapers, including a copy of The Irish Field, on his way to have breakfast with his mother in Raheny. Sitting in her front room in north Dublin, his eye was drawn to a picture of Noel Meade, president of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association (IRTA), and the headline: “We just don’t like to be treated like criminals”. 

In what would prove to be a highly controversial interview, Meade delivered frank views about the programme of joint inspections of trainers’ stables that had been launched by the Turf Club and the Department of Agriculture the previous March, as part of an anti-doping initiative in the sport. It was a measure devised by Gordon and the regulatory body in response to a series of high-profile anabolic steroid drug busts in horse racing, including Cheltenham winning trainer Philip Fenton and Carlow vet John Hughes, both of whom were caught with the performance enhancer Nitrotain. 

While Meade, a well known trainer in his own right, set out in the interview that he had no problem with the inspections per se, he complained IRTA members were angered by what they viewed “as a little Hitler syndrome whereby they’re treated almost as guilty from the moment the inspection begins”.

He suggested the scale of the problem in Irish horse racing was likely to be miniscule, “if indeed there is any”, and that the inspectors were behaving in an overzealous and unprofessional manner. “They’re coming down as if they were on cocaine or something. There’s no common sense.”

According to records discovered by Department of Agriculture officials, Hughes alone had imported 225 kilograms of Nitrotain, enough to treat over 600 horses.

While no names were mentioned, Meade would insist privately (and later publicly when defending defamation proceedings in the High Court), that his fire was aimed directly at the Department of Agriculture’s Special Investigations Unit, led by Louis Reardon, and not the Turf Club.  Certainly, over the course of a long career as a veterinary inspector, Reardon had stepped on enough toes to experience his share of complaints, including a former TD who wrote to the minister at the time alleging that he had recordings of Reardon and a colleague being “rude, mean, violent and aggressive” to a lady in a wheelchair who was paraplegic. (When the Department pressed for a copy of the recordings, the complaints fell away.) 

But in this instance, there was no doubt in Gordon’s mind that he – and not Reardon – was the target of Meade’s invective. Furthermore, he believed the comments were defamatory. “I’m absolutely certain that article was referring to me,” he told the High Court when his case against the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association came to trial before a jury. “I was the only person complained about throughout all of these inspections. There was no complaint made to the Department of Agriculture about their officials.”

He said the interview with Meade left him feeling “frustrated, humiliated and very very upset”. He believed it was a serious misrepresentation of a crucial and very necessary doping deterrent in horse racing. “A lot of people buy bloodstock in Ireland, significant international purchasers, and if they thought that horses were being bred from horses who were given anabolic steroids they would walk away,” he said in evidence.

He also took issue with Meade’s characterisation of the levels of doping in Ireland as “minuscule” given that sizable discoveries of anabolic steroids had been found. According to records discovered by Department of Agriculture officials, Hughes alone had imported 225 kilograms of Nitrotain, enough to treat over 600 horses.

Granted a right of reply in The Irish Field, a publication which boasts a weekly readership of 50,000, the Turf Club wrote: “These inspections are carried out courteously, impartially and professionally”.

“Perhaps at no time in the history of the sport has it been more important to ensure that we carry out that role in the most stringent manner possible. Our sport and our industry need us to do that job properly if we are to continue to enjoy the reputation we do worldwide. We make no apologies for that,” the piece continued.

Trench warfare

For Gordon, The Irish Field interview was not an isolated incident. He had been feeling under attack for some months – since March 26, 2014, the day he and a team of joint inspectors arrived at trainer Liz Doyle’s yard with a prosecution document wrongly suggesting a link between her and disgraced vet John Hughes. 

Efforts to clear up the row had failed. If anything, the trenches on either side were getting deeper.

After his deputy Declan Buckley failed to patch things up with Liz Doyle at Fairyhouse on April 6, resulting in raised voices and a ripped document, the trainer’s mother Avril Doyle put in a phone call to the chief executive of the Turf Club, Denis Egan.

“I said ‘Chris, I have had enough of it’. You can keep your letter and it is in the hands of the Trainers Association and their solicitors now.”

Trainer Liz Doyle

On that call, Egan said he explained to Doyle that he had written her daughter’s name and a question mark on the lodgment docket in the book of evidence prior to the March inspection, a fact Gordon had not been aware of at the time. Doyle, however, didn’t accept his explanation and claimed she and her daughter had been shown a different document entirely, one that where details like the initials ‘LD’ had effectively been Tipp-Exed out, and where ‘Liz Doyle’ had been written beside the figure €200.

This left the Turf Club in a quandary. The official position was that nothing untoward had happened at the Kitestown inspection. But even if officials at the regulator wished to apologise for presenting the wrong document, they felt they could not do so while the Doyles persisted in accusing Gordon of deliberately presenting false information at Kitestown, a potentially criminal allegation of wrongdoing that was utterly denied, as untrue, by the security chief. 

In such circumstances, the word ‘sorry’ could be misinterpreted as a grave admission. Instead, Egan wrote to Liz Doyle confirming she was in good standing with the Turf Club.

“Ms Avril Doyle’s statement is unambiguous and its veracity, given her high-profile reputation, is unlikely to be challenged.”

Solicitor’s letter on behalf of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association

When Gordon next crossed paths with Doyle at the Curragh racecourse on June 8, the trainer was still upset at what had happened in her yard. All she wanted was an apology to take the heat out of the issue, but according to Gordon, Doyle claimed the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association was encouraging her mother to make a formal complaint. In court, Doyle denied making such a comment.

In the absence of a formal apology, Gordon told Doyle he would like to say sorry in a personal capacity for what had happened at Kitestown which she seemed open to. He composed a letter which he planned to give her at the races in Clonmel the following week on June 13. 

But events overtook him. Doyle later recalled him approaching her with the letter on her way into the stable yard at Clonmel. “I said ‘Chris, I have had enough of it’. You can keep your letter and it is in the hands of the Trainers Association and their solicitors now.”

Indeed, the day before, on June 12, the late Neville O’Byrne, senior steward with the Turf Club, had received a solicitor’s letter from Frank Ward & co, on behalf of the Trainers Association, containing allegations Gordon described as false, outrageous and damaging.

The letter claimed that the security chief had used untrue information, (Liz Doyle’s name appearing on the Hughes’ lodgment docket) “in the hope of entrapping Ms Doyle into an admission of some wrongdoing which might jeopardise or destroy her professional reputation as a horse trainer”. The IRTA was demanding an immediate investigation into this “awful and illegal treatment”. 

Ward enclosed a copy of a statement made by Avril Doyle, the high-profile former politician who was particularly well-known in equestrian circles as a former President of the Equestrian Federation of Ireland.  The solicitor described her as “a person of the highest integrity”. The letter continued: “Ms Avril Doyle’s statement is unambiguous and its veracity, given her high profile reputation, is unlikely to be challenged”.

Turf Club CEO Denis Egan said he was absolutely shocked at the serious allegations contained in the letter. “In my 25 years in the Turf Club, and I cannot speak for the previous 203 years, the Turf Club has never, ever set out to entrap anybody.”

With the claim of entrapment now on a legal footing, Gordon felt he could not deliver his personal apology to Liz Doyle.

After a week, O’Byrne replied to the IRTA’s lawyers that the matter would be investigated. The regulator carried out an internal review into the allegations and then called in its solicitors Beachcroft, for an independent probe, which ultimately cleared Gordon, and his deputy Declan Buckley of any wrongdoing. Their actions and behaviour were found to be “appropriate, proportionate and reasonable”. The Doyles were aggrieved that they were not interviewed as part of the investigation process. 

An alleged smear campaign

While Gordon and Buckley were given the all clear, matters did not rest there. In fact, Gordon would claim the letter from Frank Ward marked the beginning of a smear campaign against him by Michael Grassick and Noel Meade, the two top officials of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association. 

Within the “bubble” of horse racing, Gordon claimed word got around that he was some sort of fraudster who Tippexed documents.

First off, he had to face two further complaints of misconduct from the Trainers Association. On June 4, 2014, he was accused of unlawful entry at the yard of prominent horse trainer Adrian McGuinness, a high profile member of the IRTA committee. McGuinness was at the shops when the joint inspection team arrived. While the Department officials began their work, Gordon said he waited, in line with his limited powers, outside the property until the trainer arrived back.

The Turf Club CEO recalled Meade as saying that the trust was gone between the regulator and the IRTA.

“The following morning, June 5, Michael Grassick, the Chief Executive of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association, rang my boss and alleged that I was searching the private office of that trainer with the Department officials when he arrived on the scene, which was absolutely false,” Gordon told the High Court.

Out of 80 joint inspections between the Turf Club and the Department of Agriculture, McGuinness was the only trainer prosecuted and convicted of possessing unauthorised animal remedies at his grounds in Lusk, Dublin. He was fined €2,500 at the District Court.

In late August, Grassick was in touch with the Turf Club again. This time Gordon was accused of failing to produce a letter of introduction at the yard of racehorse trainer Francis Flood the previous April, thereby invalidating the inspection. The claim was not pursued by Flood who was before the regulator’s Appeals and Referrals committee.

It is a “coarse and a common word and not one for a court, but I was very upset on the matter”.

Liz Doyle

But the next day, in a call to Egan, Noel Meade requested Gordon’s immediate suspension. The Turf Club CEO recalled Meade as saying that the trust was gone between the regulator and the IRTA.

When Egan explained that there were no grounds for imposing such a sanction, given that Gordon was in good standing with the Turf Club, he said Meade replied: “We believe he is guilty. We have no confidence in him. We don’t trust him. He is under suspicion and he should be suspended.”

Backing up his case, Meade said there were several complaints against Gordon. But Egan believed it all boiled down to what had happened at Liz Doyle’s yard in Kitestown.

A private meeting at the Keadeen Hotel

About a week before Meade called for Gordon’s suspension, there had been an attempt to resolve the rift. On August 15, 2014, senior officials from the Turf Club agreed to meet with the Doyles and the top brass of the IRTA in a private room at the Keadeen Hotel in Newbridge, Co Kildare. Neither Gordon nor his deputy head of security Declan Buckley was invited to attend. Liz Doyle later said she had expected them to be there.

The Doyles brought to the Keadeen meeting a mock-up document of what they maintained they had been shown by Gordon the previous March. This led to Gordon being called back from his holidays to give an account of his actions before the senior stewards of the Turf Club.

While the Keadeen meeting was described by the parties as amicable, it was ultimately fruitless. By this stage the Doyles, still hoping for an unconditional apology, were frustrated and believed they were not being taken seriously by the Turf Club.

Weld was apparently of the view that it was all a storm in a teacup.

With matters remaining unresolved, relations with the Turf Club security team remained strained. As recently as April 2018 at the Ballinrobe Races, Doyle forgot her stable yard pass and had to sign in for security purposes in front of Buckley. “In the book, she wrote ‘liar’,” he recalled. She then said: “‘Oh, look what I’ve done, I wrote “liar” oh, dear oh, dear’ and then she went on and wrote “Liz Doyle”.”

Doyle did not deny the episode in court. She admitted calling Buckley a liar on other occasions too. It is a “coarse and a common word and not one for a court, but I was very upset on the matter,” she said.

“Vendetta”: Dermot Weld’s alleged intervention

Other figures were beavering away in the background trying to forge an entente between the Doyles, the IRTA and the Turf Club -including renowned Irish trainer, Dermot Weld.

In the world of horse racing, Weld is truly among the elite, having won two Melbourne Cups in Australia. It is one of the biggest races on the international circuit and Weld was the first non-Australian to achieve such a feat.

The Turf Club’s Neville O’Byrne broached the issue of Weld mediating the dispute while sitting beside him at the annual Moyglare Stud dinner. The two men were good friends. Weld recalled that O’Byrne asked if he and another gentleman could help behind the scenes “for the good of Irish racing”. Looking back, Weld told the High Court he was naive because he thought an apology to the Doyles was the simple solution, and he wasn’t able to get that. He had hoped the two sides would be able to shake hands and move on.

He thought the Doyles had been very badly treated. The inspectors had gone in “all guns blazing” to Liz Doyle’s yard and decided she was a “culprit”, he said in court. However, he accepted that he had not been aware that she had accused Gordon of tampering with the document and trying to entrap her.

In Weld’s opinion, the joint stable visits being conducted by the Turf Club and the Department of Agriculture, were “very aggressive”.

Weld, who was on the committee of the IRTA at the time, said other trainers had the same view. He was hearing reports that gates were being knocked down and locks were being taken off. “The feeling was that they were extreme, they were unnecessary, they were over the top, there was too much intrusion and they were not necessary to be carried out with the force and frequency in the way it was being handled,” he said. The complaints were mostly against the Department and Egan, as chief executive of the Turf Club, he said.

When more controversial issues were put to Weld about an alleged petition and vendetta against Gordon, his recall from six years previously was at times less certain. However, Weld, who was subpoenaed to give evidence by Gordon, challenged the detail of conversations he was alleged to have had with Egan, six years previously.

According to the Turf Club CEO, he was out with friends at around 9 pm on Saturday, August 23, 2014, when he got an unexpected call from Weld, lasting 12 minutes.

Egan says Weld told him he had been approached by Grassick who asked him to sign a petition to remove Gordon as head of security of the Turf Club, as they had lost confidence in him. Weld allegedly said he had never heard the likes of it in his life and that he wouldn’t be signing any petition. At a follow-up encounter with Egan in The Curragh the next day, Weld allegedly told him that it was crazy and he would get it stopped.

On Monday, Beachcroft solicitors fired a warning letter to the Trainers Association over the alleged circulation of a petition. Egan claimed when he next spoke to Weld several days later, the trainer told him the legal letter had quietened things down.

The Turf Club chief also alleged that Weld informed him that the trainers had a vendetta against Gordon and that they were blaming him for bringing in the Department of Agriculture to effectively fire the shots on behalf of the regulator. He allegedly added that “they were looking for something to get him on”. Weld himself was apparently of the view that it was all a storm in a teacup.

In his evidence, Weld did not subscribe to Egan’s version of events. While he remembered only the gist of their conversations, he said there was no petition to get rid of Gordon. He said Grassick had approached him before a race and asked him to sign a letter that would bring all the sides together to try and achieve a compromise. As he was busy saddling a horse, he said he had asked him to come back later.

He did not recall using the word “vendetta”. “I am pretty certain I didn’t say it because the trainers don’t have a vendetta,” he said.

For its part, the IRTA also maintained no such petition against Gordon ever existed. In a legal reply to Beachcroft, Frank Ward said the claim was “utterly untrue”. Even Egan accepted that he never saw a copy of it.

Gordon said the news of a petition made him “very scared”. He felt that the IRTA could have him forced out of his job. He sought legal advice. 

Feeling boxed into a corner, Gordon issued defamation proceedings against the IRTA in October 2014. “We weren’t pleased that it had come to this but Mr Gordon obviously had to clear his name,” Egan told the court. “We just took a backseat at that stage and let it follow its course,” he added.

Under pressure from the IRTA, it was suggested the Turf Club’s head of security would go on gardening leave. Instead, Gordon stayed on in a restricted capacity with the regulator while he waited for his case to come to court.

*****

Part 3- “You trainers are the same, you are all corrupt”

Chris Gordon, head of security at the Turf Club.

“I have been sent to Coventry by Noel Meade and Michael Grassick,” Chris Gordon, the Turf Club’s head of security, told the High Court jury. “I have been boycotted.” 

After what he described as a “harrowing” five and a half years, the ex-guard’s defamation showdown against the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association (IRTA) was finally in full swing.

The jury trial, optimistically penciled in for a fortnight, began in early February before Mr Justice Bernard Barton. Marked at times by explosive evidence, it ended up running for seven weeks – even as the world outside began to close down. 

In his opening address, the security chief’s barrister Thomas Hogan set the tone for the jury. “Mr Gordon claims he was the victim of an orchestrated campaign of defamation by the Association. A campaign to present him as a wholly unsuitable and dishonest individual who shouldn’t be permitted to hold the position of Head of Security of The Turf Club”.

The stakes were high. Gordon had put himself out on a limb. He was suing the esteemed IRTA for damages, and aggravated damages, alleging that the organisation, led by racing luminaries Meade and Grassick, had waged a defamatory campaign against him, aimed at removing him from his job.

The purpose of this campaign?

Gordon claimed it was to undermine the anti-doping programme of random stable yard inspections he had unleashed in conjunction with the Special Investigations Unit of the Department of Agriculture in early 2014 in an effort to keep the sport clean. “I was trying to do some good for racing. An industry worth €2 billion a year with 28,000 jobs breeding,” the security chief told the court.

Certainly, there was evidence the round of joint inspections had put trainers’ noses out of joint. During a brief stint in the witness box, the renowned trainer and former jockey Gordon Elliott told the court that while he had no problem with Gordon, Louis Reardon, the veterinary inspector from the Department of Agriculture was “rude”, “pushy” and made him feel like a criminal in his own yard. Meade too had complained of a “little Hitler syndrome” among inspectors in an interview with The Irish Field in August 2014.

It was a major part of Gordon’s case that when trainer Liz Doyle first approached Noel Meade about the wrong document being presented to her during a joint inspection of her yard in March 2014, the IRTA leaders picked up that baton and ran with it for their own ends. This was denied. 

Gordon, a former garda superintendent, claimed in the fallout of the Doyle saga – in which her name had been erroneously linked to a vet caught with substantial quantities of steroids – that the IRTA defamed him repeatedly, with premeditation. This, he said, occurred in an interview Meade gave to The Irish Field, at the Keadeen Hotel meeting with the Doyles and Turf Club stewards, in complaints made to the Turf Club, and in a legal letter issued by Frank Ward & Co on behalf of the Association in June 2014.

Malice and qualified privilege

The jury was told from the start that the claims of defamation were to be defended on grounds of qualified privilege. This meant the IRTA did not have to stand over the truth of past accusations made against Gordon. Instead, the representative association argued it should not be held to account for statements, which might otherwise be defamatory, that it had a duty to make on behalf of its members.

However, Gordon’s case was that the IRTA chiefs walked into the late Frank Ward’s offices in early June 2014, fully aware that the misconduct allegations being made against him by the Doyles were without foundation. He claimed that regardless of what they knew to be the truth, the Association’s leaders instructed its lawyers to write a letter to the Turf Club accusing him of entrapment. 

This, Gordon alleged, amounted to malice. And malice, if proven by his legal team, would trump the IRTA’s defence of qualified privilege and go towards aggravated damages.

While the onus of proof was on Gordon’s side, it was still essential for the defence to show that the leading figures in the IRTA had stood up for Liz  Doyle in good faith.

“You are very much in the public eye when training horse,”

Noel Meade, president of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association

In respect of The Irish Field article, the defence argued that an unincorporated association such as the IRTA could not be held liable for the outpourings of one of its members. Meade’s interview had not been sanctioned by the IRTA in advance. For his part, Meade insisted that his comments about the joint inspections had been aimed squarely at the Department of Agriculture and not Gordon or the regulator.

As the trial geared up, there was no shortage of legal firepower in the courtroom with both sides sporting two senior counsel – Tom Hogan and Mark Harty, with junior counsel Shane English, acting for Gordon; and two former attorney generals, John Rogers and Michael McDowell, with junior counsel Francis Kieran, representing the IRTA.

Meade rows in behind Doyle

In the first three weeks, Gordon’s legal team called a stream of witnesses, to make out his case including his boss at the Turf Club Denis Egan, his deputy Declan Buckley and Department of Agriculture inspector, Louis Reardon. Most spent more than a day being grilled by lawyers.

Then it was the turn of the defence. IRTA president Noel Meade was the first witness to be called on behalf of the association.

The horse trainer from Co Meath recalled that it was at the races sometime in May 2014 that Liz Doyle first approached him to discuss her grievance against Gordon over what had happened during the inspection of her yard. Meade said he had no reason to doubt the truth of her account and was subsequently impressed that her story never changed. He said he promised to do what he could to help her as an IRTA member. 

On that basis, the court heard he and Grassick accompanied the Doyles to the IRTA’s law firm Frank Ward & Co in early June to lodge a complaint and seek an apology from the Turf Club. The letter also demanded an immediate investigation.

As a trainer himself, Meade told the jury that being linked on a lodgment docket to Nitrotain would be an “absolute disaster”.  

She said her mother had explained to her that tampering with a document was an old fashioned Garda trick to get people to admit to stuff

“You are very much in the public eye when training horses,” he said.

The jury heard he could not understand why the investigation subsequently set up by the Turf Club to probe the conduct of its own officials did not see fit to interview the Doyles.

When asked under cross-examination if he was aware that the IRTA, in its defence, was no longer claiming that Gordon did anything improper in Liz Doyle’s yard, the Association president’s extraordinary reply was: “I have to say I didn’t know that, no, I always thought we claimed that he did.” 

Meade still maintained that Doyle’s version of events was the truth.

“An old garda trick”

Central to the trial: Liz Doyle

For her part, Liz Doyle had to face up to an epic five days in the witness box – a stretch that would charter the case into previously unknown waters.

It began slowly, when under cross-examination by Mark Harty she was asked why she thought Chris Gordon would try to beef up evidence against her by tampering with a document.  She replied: “He wanted somebody “got” on his watch.” She said she believed Gordon had “egg on his face” because the Department of Agriculture had discovered a trainer using anabolic steroids which he, in his job with the regulator had missed.

She said her mother had explained to her that tampering with a document was “an old fashioned Garda trick” to get people to admit to stuff, a shortcut. 

Asked if she believed Gordon had a “cunning plan”, to Tippex out her initials on the docket and write her name on it instead, she replied “yes”. She rejected Gordon’s version of events that he had only produced the document in the yard when he was expressly asked about the purpose of the visit. 

“Your attempted character assassination of me will not change my story”

Liz Doyle

She said she understood that Gordon had spent the past five years of his professional life under a spotlight, adding: “My name is worth everything to me as well.” When counsel suggested that her name had in fact been cleared in a matter of hours or days, she replied: “Mr Harty, my name has been in the clear all my life. It was in the clear before Mr. Gordon drove into my yard that day and it is still in the clear today.”

As the exchange continued, Harty asked Doyle: “Why in God’s name are you happy to see that that man is still in a position where this is hanging over him?” She told the court: “ Because there were eight people in my yard.” Those in attendance included members of her staff and Department of Agriculture officials. 

Doyle said it was her view that nothing had been cleared up in the meantime. She had still not received the apology from the regulator she believed was her due. “I certainly don’t go around making dangerous or reckless false allegations about people, I never would and I never will,” she said.

As the somewhat charged cross-examination drew to a close, the trainer told Harty: “Your attempted character assassination of me will not change my story.” 

And then it came –  an unexpected narrative twist. 

Asked by Harty to explain the essence of her complaint about the document shown to her at Fairyhouse by Declan Buckley on April 6, 2014, she replied: “In my view, it was the start of my realisation that there was a cover-up on the Turf Club’s behalf of what had been shown to me in my yard and it is my belief that if Mr. Egan says that he was responsible for this document then it’s possible that he is involved in it as well.”

This was a brand new and very serious allegation about corruption at the highest levels of the Turf Club. But was it just an off the cuff parting shot in the heat of cross-examination? 

Avril Doyle takes the stand

The next witness to be called to give evidence for the defence was Liz Doyle’s mother, the former Fine Gael junior minister and MEP, Avril Doyle. 

A running thread through the trial was that Doyle was the one pulling the strings for her daughter. Gordon’s side even made the suggestion that their witness statements had been coordinated – both were allegations the former politician utterly denied. She said as a witness to the yard inspection, she was happy to support Liz’s case. “But, no, I didn’t try to influence the Trainers Association. If my presence in Frank Ward’s office was influence, well hands up,” she told the jury.

Then under cross-examination, the ex-TD dropped a bombshell.

On week five of the trial, Doyle revealed a conversation with Turf Club boss Denis Egan that had hitherto been kept under wraps. If there were legal reasons why this information had not been previously revealed to the jury, Doyle was now being encouraged by Gordon’s lawyers to elaborate.

She said she first spoke to Egan about the joint yard inspection in or around March 31, 2014 and not – as the court had previously heard – on April 15. She wanted to know from the Turf Club chief what in “God’s name” was going on. By then Doyle had evidence that the document presented at Kitestown with her daughter’s name on it, was not a true copy of the lodgment docket found in the prosecution file of Carlow vet, John Hughes.

Discussing the discrepancies on the docket presented by Gordon, Doyle said she told Egan: “If there had even been a question mark beside “Liz Doyle”, ..and the initials had been left on the docket we were shown, I would have understood why the seven inspectors from the two bodies arrived in our yard. I would have understood it but, Denis, it wasn’t. It was presented as a fait accompli – “Liz Doyle” beside the “200”.

By her account, the importance of this conversation would become apparent when Liz Doyle returned from Fairyhouse on April 6 with a torn and crumpled copy of the Hughes docket she had been given by Declan Buckley. 

She believed the yard inspection had gone wrong and “they were all protecting one another from thereon in”

When lo and behold, this version of the document had a question mark on it, and initials, Doyle said she believed this was an attempt at an “exit strategy” by the Turf Club. 

She said when she next spoke to Egan on April 15th, she asked him how he could have been so stupid as to have added a question mark on to the copy lodgment sheet used by Buckley.

Doyle was alleging a full-blown cover-up.

When Hogan suggested that her account of events was an “absurd concoction”, Doyle replied:  “I’ve taken an oath here, and I actually understand very clearly at this late stage in my life what perjury is and implication of perjury. So for you to suggest I have concocted anything is totally out of order as far as I’m concerned, that is tantamount to saying I am telling lies.” 

She told the jury she was furious that “the chancers” from the Turf Club and the Department had “tried it on” in their yard. She claimed the inspectors had attempted to entrap her daughter and bounce her into an admission of guilt.

Asked if Buckley at Fairyhouse had been the messenger in the second “try-on” in this elaborate fraud, she replied yes, that was her opinion.

She said she still did not accept that Egan had written “Liz Doyle?” on the lodgment docket on January 22nd, some months prior to the inspection. She believed the yard inspection had gone wrong and “they were all protecting one another from thereon in”.  

“I can understand that but I don’t approve of it,” she said.

The nuclear button

As the cross-examination continued into a second day, Hogan put it to Doyle that her daughter was never going to get an apology from the Turf Club while she persisted with this “preposterous conspiracy theory”.  He noted that the alleged cover-up was not mentioned in solicitor Frank Ward’s letter of complaint to the Turf Club in June 2014 and he queried when she first realised the Trainers Association was not going to stand over her allegations. 

I am chief executive of a regulatory body and that is about as low as you can go.

Turf Club chief executive Denis Egan

Doyle said the IRTA had been in lockstep with her and her daughter from the beginning and she did not accept that the organisation had resiled from that position.

Hogan argued the IRTA had made a clear climbdown. While the solicitor’s letter from Frank Ward in June accused Gordon of entrapment, legal correspondence from the IRTA the following October was considerably more muted. “The fact that your client was not aware at the time of the inspection Liz Doyle had been written in manuscript form by Mr. Denis Egan of the Turf Club reflects poorly on the organisation of the Turf Club,” it read.

Doyle said this reflected legal advice they had received and the fact that they did not have a photocopy of the document presented by Gordon in the yard. She said she had been told by Egan that it had been binned.

Doyle claimed all of these issues had been raised during the Keadeen Hotel meeting between the Turf Club and IRTA officials in August 2014, including Egan’s involvement in a cover up. Hogan suggested to Doyle this was implausible as it would have been a case of hitting the “nuclear button”. The former MEP held her ground.

Egan, who had finished his turn in the witness box days earlier, now had to be recalled from the Cheltenham festival to contradict Doyle’s account of the April 2014 phone call. Back on the stand, he joked: “Stay away from me”, before turning to matters in hand. 

He told Gordon’s lawyers he was flabbergasted to be implicated in a fraud and a conspiracy. “I am chief executive of a regulatory body and that is about as low as you can go. I am saying with absolute certainty I did not create a document between the time alleged by Mrs Doyle, which is 31st March and 6th April.” His evidence lasted less than five minutes. Lawyers for the IRTA made it known to the court that they would not be challenging his testimony.

A new vista

In the meantime, Grassick, a retired trainer and the CEO of the Trainers Association was called to the stand. Like Meade before him, he set out to the jury why he believed it had been important to row in behind Liz Doyle’s complaint about the Turf Club. “We couldn’t ignore it because I mean obviously there was going to be more of these inspections so I felt that we had to protect trainers for any future inspections, that they would have to be carried out in accordance with what we would accept as proper standards,” he told the court.

But unlike Meade, Grassick had to face a new vista of allegations, Avril Doyle’s belief in a Turf Club cover-up going all the way to the top. Under cross-examination, the IRTA chief executive said he had not taken notes but he thought he recalled Doyle raising the issue of Egan and false documents with Frank Ward at the June meeting. 

It was put to him by Harty that it was a very serious matter, not just one rogue official in the Turf Club, but a rogue organisation. Grassick agreed it was serious but wouldn’t adopt the word “rogue”. Asked why no alarm bells rang when the explosive accusation about Egan was not included in Doyle’s statement, he said he didn’t read her statement at the time. 

“We had misgivings of what was going on. That is why we wanted an investigation. We wanted to know, we wanted to hear either side of the story, what actually happened,” he said in his evidence.

Grassick like Meade emphasised the consistency of the Doyles’ account. “I have no reason to doubt them, no. Never have,” he said.

He recalled standing on his own drinking tea by the trainers’ tea room at the Leopardstown races when Gordon approached him and said of the jockeys in the weigh room: “They’re all corrupt”.

Earlier, the jury had heard Grassick and Egan had an excellent working relationship. They would sometimes speak two or three times in a day. The IRTA CEO again confirmed it. 

Harty asked him: Is that your test? You will deal with crooks who you get on well with and you won’t deal with crooks who you don’t get on well with?” Grassick replied: “I think that is a terrible thing to say.”

Harty followed on with: “You are the person who is standing here to say you had a meeting with a woman on 4th June who told you that Denis Egan was falsifying documents to cover-up wrongdoing in the Turf Club. That is what you are saying, isn’t that right?” “Yes,” Grassick replied.

Despite getting on well, the IRTA chief said he never raised the allegation with Egan.

Later in his evidence, Grassick said it wasn’t until the Keadeen Hotel meeting on August 15, 2014 that he was told Egan’s handwriting was on the March 26th inspection document presented in Doyle’s stables. He said previously he understood from the Doyles that the head of the Turf Club had only been responsible for the Fairyhouse version.

Asked if he had made any efforts to clarify the Doyles’ story, he said he expected the IRTA’s solicitors to have raised any pertinent questions.

In the course of Grassick’s evidence, it emerged that he had an issue with Chris Gordon, dating back to an encounter in 2012. He recalled standing on his own drinking tea by the trainers’ tea room at the Leopardstown races when Gordon approached him and said of the jockeys in the weigh room: “They’re all corrupt”. Grassick said Gordon then added: “You trainers are the same, you are all corrupt.” The IRTA chief said he tried to avoid contact with Gordon after that as he thought he had a terrible attitude towards Irish racing for a man in his position. But he added that he did not want him out of his job because of it.

A public health announcement

By mid-March, an edginess had entered the defamation proceedings. Outside the courtroom were near-empty streets as Dublin began to lock down due to the coronavirus. Office workers had been urged to stay home and St Patrick’s Day parades across the country had been canned. On March 18, in the absence of the jury, Rogers asked Justice Barton whether the trial should be abandoned or adjourned on public health grounds. It was day 25 of the hearing. 

How was a jury supposed to practice social distancing when deliberating on a verdict, he wondered? Would they rush to their decision over concerns about the virus?

Rogers pointed out that Turf Club boss Denis Egan had returned from the Cheltenham Festival and had sat in the court “among a bevy of other, possibly just observers”. Supporting the submission, McDowell, also for the IRTA, said that while he would fulfill his duties as a barrister, he was facing domestic disquiet by coming into court every day.

Gordon’s side, however, was keen to plough on. Harty argued that as lawyers, rather than epidemiologists, they should follow government advice, which at that time was for no gatherings of over 100 people. “The Court, I am sure, may have listened to the ministerial broadcast last night from the Taoiseach where one of the most important things he said was that we should listen to the experts and not tell them that they are doing the wrong thing”. Criminal trials, he noted, were continuing. 

Harty suggested the jury should be spread out in court for closing speeches. “I am told that the jury room, in fact, is quite spacious and that there should be no difficulty there. In response to Rogers’ concerns about where the jury would get lunch, he said if it came to it, he would pay for 12 sandwiches from the Centra 100 yards away on the quays.

Inquiries were made, arrangements were put in place and the trial continued.

Final arguments

In his closing address to the jury, Rogers argued that evidence of a sustained campaign or “vendetta” against Gordon simply did not stack up.

He said at all times when representing Liz Doyle, his clients had maintained an honest belief that something improper or irregular happened. He likened the position of Grassick and Meade to shop stewards trying to help union members and being held liable for their efforts.

The aftermath of the wrong document being shown at the Kitestown inspection had been “poisoned” by the unwillingness of the Turf Club and Mr. Gordon to deal with it effectively, the court was told.

In reply, Mark Harty told the jurors in his final speech that it was open to them to find Gordon had been the victim of an orchestrated campaign, “Insofar as its aim was to take Gordon off the pitch, to remove him from dealing with trainers at all it was undoubtedly a severe campaign.” In this, he urged the jurors to mark their disapproval by awarding punitive damages to the Turf Club’s head of security.

He said there was one “crisp” piece of evidence that indicated an orchestrated campaign. Because Michael Grassick had never heard Declan Buckley or Denis Egan say anything that he didn’t like about the trainers in 2012 he didn’t pursue any allegation or wrongdoing against them. “Mr Grassick has made it perfectly clear that even though he says Avril Doyle told him there were questions to be asked of Denis Egan he decided not to do it,” Harty said.

Having been apprised of the law by Justice Barton, the jury retired with the issue paper at half three on Wednesday, March 25th.

After four hours of deliberations, the jurors returned to court with a verdict. The jury found in favour of Gordon on six out of seven claims of defamation. In the seventh, Grassick had been cleared of acting in bad faith when he passed on to Denis Egan a complaint made by trainer Francis Flood over an inspection in his yard.

General damages were set at €200,000. On top of that, the jury awarded Gordon aggravated and exemplary damages amounting to €100,000.

Justice Barton thanked the jury members for their diligence, informing them that nearly all the criminal trials had collapsed because jurors decided they couldn’t attend because of the coronavirus.

For Gordon, it was a stunning victory. The 60-year-old had been veritably vindicated, even if he had paid a high price to get there both personally and professionally. He remains head of security with the Turf Club’s successor, the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board. 

However, the joint inspections he championed to curb the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the sport are, for now, history.