Joe Foley

Social media was made for moments like that🙌

Today we said our final goodbye to one of life’s true gentlemen, Mick Scott. Mick was part of the Punchestown family for decades. Often the first person race goers would meet on arrival, Mick always had a kind word and warm welcome. A great man for a cup of tea and chat and a calming influence on the most hectic of days with a classic “don’t be getting excited” line. Mick Scott was a man for family, community, racing (here and with our neighbours in Naas), sport with GAA and Golf. A Kerry native who loved a pint in McCormacks or a coffee with pals. Our thoughts are with his family and friends especially our great pal and colleague Margaret who kept him fully informed the daily Festival debriefs. Thank you Mick. It was a pleasure.

🇫🇷⚜️WAY TO PARIS⚜️🇫🇷

🚨🚨 some of the bloopers from the @IrishEBF_ Gowran Classic launch last week 🚨🚨 all tickets for the day are sponsored by the @inpbaoc so go to gowranpark.ie and download yours today !!! Monday June 1st the Irish EBF Gowran Classic Day

Epsom Derby - Sea The Stars - 2009 Need I say more?

Newmarket 6-May-2006 @NewmarketRace #20yearsago #archives #fromthearchive #memories #HorseRacing #HealyRacing #OnThisDay #ReelingInTheYears Dandy Man and Niall McCullagh win for owner Alfie McLean and trainer Con Collins. (c)healyracing.ie

€200,000 Irish EBF Gowran Classic: A Premier Stage for Middle-Distance Stars Featuring €1,000 Racegoer Sweepstakes and Free Entry Full story - ebfstallions.com/news/ 🏆The countdown to June 1st is on! 🏇 🏆81 entries remain for €200k Irish EBF Gowran Classic, richest race @GowranPark1 & the crown jewel of the Smullen Series 🏆Winner gets automatic entry into the @curraghrace Irish Derby or Oaks for a filly! Full list of entries - status.hri-ras.ie/race-meetings.… #IrishEBFGoodForRacing #IrishEBF #GowranClassic #HorseRacing #SmullenSeries

"A filly we like a lot." Debut winner Dark Lucinda will return to @GowranPark1 for the €200,000 @IrishEBF_ Gowran Classic - "a great initiative and a race we'd like to support," says @ptwomeyracing

EXCLUSIVE: Step inside Cherie DeVaux’s historic Kentucky Derby day with never-before-seen footage. 🌹🎥 Filmed & produced by America’s Best Racing. @reredevaux

True Love’s groom Siobhan Bergin looked genuinely overjoyed after the 1,000 Guineas. She then said some lovely things about the filly and her trainer. Aidan O’Brien reciprocated. There’s more from them and Michael Tabor in my @RacingPost members’ piece. url-shortener.me/LUCG

✨JANCIS✨ From orphan to Group-race star - many congratulations to Arturo Cousiño with Jancis. Much effort has gone bringing this branch of the Cristalline line to life, it’s had its challenges & lovely to see Jancis reward Arturo’s patience, with help from Willie McCreery

Night Raider stays on well to win the Gr.3 Palace House Stakes at @NewmarketRace for Wathnan Racing and @karl_burke 🐎 Purchased by Joe Foley for 155,000gns at the #TattsDecember Foal Sale from Peter Nolan.

"There's so much going in the world that we can't control - but backing Irish horse racing is something we can control - this industry is worth billions." Great to welcome Tánaiste Simon Harris to @punchestownrace along with at least one familar racing face!

THE CURE - JUST LIKE HEAVEN

The disgusting raw vocals of this song make it one of the best things to listen to.

“I am on another planet!” 🌎 Richard Murphy describes the joy of owning a Punchestown Festival winner after Raise You Up’s success in the Red Mills Series Final 🙌

This is what it’s all about! 😍 Jubilant scenes for connections of Raise You Up at Punchestown 🙌 Congratulations to owners Lorus Projects Limited and trainer @rosullivan82 on a one-two 👏

For 28 years, Michael O'Leary ran Ryanair like a man who couldn't stand his own customers. People kept flying because the tickets were so cheap. Then in 2014 he tried being nice to them. Profits jumped 37 percent. The share price jumped 55. He told the whole story in a one-hour lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin in late 2015. It's the Carmichael Lecture, watch the full thing if you can, because there is more useful business teaching in that hour than in most full MBAs. On the third rewatch, these are the parts that stuck with me the most. The single biggest secret of Ryanair has nothing to do with marketing. It is a 25-minute turnaround. Once a Ryanair plane lands, the crew has it cleaned, refueled, reboarded, and back in the air in 25 minutes. Aer Lingus needs about an hour to do the same thing. After three flights in a day, Ryanair has banked two hours, which is enough time to fit in two extra flights. Every single Ryanair plane flies more flights per day than every single Aer Lingus plane. That gap is where the entire profit margin of European cheap flying comes from. Long flights to other continents don't work the same way. A faster turnaround at JFK doesn't let you squeeze another flight to America into the day, so the saved time gets wasted. This is why O'Leary thinks Ryanair will never fly across the Atlantic but will dominate short flights inside Europe for decades. The second thing he learned was that you can get unlimited free press by saying the opposite of whatever business school is teaching that year. Ryanair had no advertising budget through the 80s and 90s. So O'Leary went on television and said things like, "customers are always right? No, they're always wrong." And, "people are your most important asset? No, they're your biggest expense." Every interview produced more coverage than a paid campaign would have. The peak came in 2009 when The Sun newspaper asked if Ryanair would allow porn on the in-flight wifi. He said yes. Within 24 hours the website got 28 times its normal traffic, and bookings quadrupled for three days straight. The third lesson is the one he was slowest to learn, and it is the most painful. The shift to being polite to customers was led by his own staff. He was the bottleneck. A Dublin Airport survey found that when Ryanair gate agents pulled passengers out of the queue to size-check their carry-on bags, 77 percent of those bags ended up fitting just fine. His own gate agents had invented rules like "the bag must fit comfortably in the sizer" so they could reject bags that technically fit. Staff were exhausted from being forced into pointless fights with customers. They wanted permission to stop. Once O'Leary gave it, they started bringing him most of the new ideas. Lesson four is about admitting you were wrong, and treating that as a press strategy. After the change, O'Leary toured Ireland, the UK, and Germany telling journalists he had been wrong about customer service for 25 years. The coverage was endless because almost no executive ever does this in public. Owning a mistake loud enough becomes its own news cycle. Lesson five is the one I think every government should tape to the wall. Ireland brought in a tax on flights during the 2009 recession. It raised about 26 million euros a year. Visitor numbers fell from 30 million to 20 million over three years. The state lost roughly 250 million euros a year in sales tax it would have collected from the visitors who never came. So Ireland was earning a tenth of what it was losing. Once Michael Noonan repealed the tax in 2014, tourism boomed and Ryanair alone accounted for 74 percent of the new traffic to and from the island. The lesson goes way beyond Ireland. Tax visitors once they're inside your country. Don't tax them at the airport, because at the airport they'll just pick somewhere else to fly. The sixth lesson is the strangest one. The average Ryanair fare is about 35 euros. O'Leary's actual long-term goal is for the ticket to be free, paid for entirely by side revenue from bag fees, snacks, wifi, and on-board gambling. The cheaper the ticket, the more passengers fly. The more passengers fly, the more side money he makes. That side money lets him cut the ticket again next year. The wheel only turns one direction, and the gap between Ryanair and every other European airline gets wider every year. Lesson seven is about why public services keep failing. The Irish health service has a politics problem. Whenever the unions are unhappy, they bypass management and go straight to the Minister for Health, who has no real power to push back. American federal workers lost the right to strike in 1947, and the United States has functioning public services almost in spite of itself as a result. No government anywhere can run a real operation while its workforce can paralyze that operation on demand. The same logic explains almost every broken public bureaucracy. The eighth lesson is a pushback against doomsday thinking. O'Leary was openly skeptical of people warning that the world was running out of oil, and skeptical of climate-change politics. His reasoning was simple and pragmatic. People are extraordinarily good at working around shortages of energy and raw materials. He tells a story he half-remembers about General Motors commissioning a study in the early 1900s that concluded car demand would top out at 900,000 cars worldwide because there were not enough chauffeurs to drive them. Henry Ford solved that within a few years by making cars cheap enough for owners to drive themselves. Markets find new oil whenever the price climbs high enough to make new drilling profitable. American oil producers came online with new techniques, flooded the market, and replaced OPEC, the alliance of oil-exporting countries, as the force that sets global oil prices. Whatever the next bottleneck is, somebody will route around it. The trick is to never bet against human ingenuity over a long enough time horizon. The ninth lesson is about how leaders rot. O'Leary refuses awards, honorary doctorates, and invitations to the dinner circuit. His reasoning is that the moment you start believing you are irreplaceable, you stop listening to the people who actually run the business. Customers write to him every day complaining about Ryanair. Those daily complaints are the only thing keeping the company grounded. The deepest lesson in the talk is the one he drops almost in passing. He spent four years studying business at Trinity College in Dublin. At no point during those four years did anybody suggest that being nice to customers might be part of a winning strategy. The single most profitable change he ever made to Ryanair was something his entire formal education had trained him not to consider.

John Fleming was always a joy to meet at the races and it was a privilege that his last runner was a Stakes winner in his own colours, NAVASSA ISLAND. The win meant so much to him, as they had persevered with her & the decision to keep her in training paid off. The Irish EBF are deeply saddened by his passing and offer their sincere condolences to his family and friends. Rest in peace John.