The patron > saint of cc the turf

W As Cheltenham prepares for the Gold Cup, Simon Caldwell meets the 'racing priest'
feast luck of the Irish. The frast of Si Patrick, their patron, is also Gold Cup day, the biggest race of the four-day Cheltenham festival. For them, it will be like celebrating Christmas Day and New Year's Eve at the same time... but only if they win, of course.
Among the 5,000 horse-mad Irish punters who will be looking for a bit of divine intervention is Fr Sean Breen, Ireland's unofficial racing chaplain. who has been making the trip to the Gloucestershire track since 1964, when the Irish horse Arkle beat the English chaser Mill House in the first of three consecutive Gold Cup triumphs.
"They said that Mill House couldn't be heat, hut Arkle beat him." he recalls, adding with the self-assurance of a man still confident in his own judgment: "I had Arlde, of course. He was a legend."
Known throughout the British Isles as "the racing priest", or more affectionately to the Irish as "the Breener". the 69-year-old priest will begin the day by celebrating Mass in honour of St Patrick in the Thistle Hotel, better known to regulars under its previous name, The Gulden Valley. Though there will be standingroom only, few are likely to leave until the Mass is well and truly over. They know that if they did, they might miss out on tips from a man regarded as good as any professional pundit, and besides, his prayers and blessings are legendary.
Last year, for exartiple, Fr Breen prayed "for winners, they are hard to get", and for "Irish winners, wherever they come from", adding as a mischievous slight against the English: "The Irish horses are the best in the world, although the French are quite good as well."
There was another year when Irish punters had so much luck at the festival that Fr Breen offered them a prayer that the bookmakers would have enough money to pay them all.
A jolly. rubicund country priest with the aspect of a farmer, Fr Breen describes the festival as "a very special occasion". Cheltenham, he said, is "the Olympics of National Hunt" because "all the best horses are there except those who are injured". Added to that is the spice of a contest principally between English and Irish mounts, a sport in which the Irish really can give their ancient foe a run for their money: last year, the Irish cleaned up with nine winners, including the Gold Cup victor, Kicking King, a horse blessed by Fr Breen beforehand at the invitation of its trainer, Tom Taafe.
Not that this was a horse which needed a crack from the whip of providence in the first place. "I le probably would have won anyway," said Fr Breen, who is keen to point out that he doesn't resort to "magic or superstition".
Fr Breen fancies an outsider to win today's Gold Cup. At the very least, he thinks Forget the Past is worth an each-way bet. If it romps home at 20-1, it may give the priest his most memorable victory since Dawn Run accomplished a Champion Hurdle and Gold Cup double in 1986.
"That was a great meeting," he said. "Dawn Run was a great mare. She looked as if she was beaten but she came back at them with tremendous courage and character. It was a , very jubilant year.
There were a lot of celebrations." Like many of those who cross the Irish Sea to turn Cheltenham into a suburb of Dublin, Fr Breen sees no contradiction between his faith and indulging in a few pints of Guinness and a flutter. Okay, it is difficult to reconcile such festivities with Lent, but nowadays, he explains, the Church sees this particular holy season as one of renewal rather than strict penance. In any case, the key to enjoying the sporting life is moderation.
"I'm not a big gambler," he said. "I'm a small gambler. I have survived 40 years of racing and that shows I am in control of it. You can't beat the bookmakers. They all have big cars, I have a small car."
Indeed, there is a serious side to a man who jokes that the Turf Club Form Book is his "second Bible" and that there must be a God because he has found himself blessed by being in a parish in Ballymore Eustace, County Kildare, the centre of Ireland's horseracing heartland. He is just
20 minutes from the courses of Naas, Punchestown and, most importantly, the Curragh, where the majority of Irish horses are trained.
His sense of balance is reflected in his practice of giving tips only after Mass has end, even if these are usually preceded by a pre-amble along the lines of. "Now that 1 have catered for your spiritual needs, I am now going to cater for you material needs..."
Most of his humour is in fact self-parody. Racing is his hobby, not his religion, and he is only too eager to justify his involvement in the sport of kings by the virtue of the social context of his visits to the course.
"You have to have something in this job," he said with blunt honesty. "It can be very lonely and you can end up living in a cocoon. I have a lot of friends in horseracing. I can go to any race meeting and pick up people I know.
"There is a fellowship in racing. It is the same wherever you go. I haveinarried a lot of racing people. such as jockeys, and they later come to me to have their babies baptised. I have an apostolate there."
He avoids answering questions about the household names with whom he associates. But when two years ago he was mugged and badly beaten outside his presbytery at the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, among those who flocked to his hospital bedside was Niall Quinn, a former Republic of Ireland football international who has played for Arsenal, Manchester City and Sunderland. Quinn and his wife, Gillian. later invited the priest to stay with them until he had recovered fully. But besides his social connections, he also appears to have developed an interesting theology of horsenicing. "Our Lord was always with people, in a kind of 'table fellowship' ... he was always going to meals." he explained. "Take Zaecheus; Our 1Lord said he wanted to go to his house. He entertained people and then he converted them. I believe a priest should be where the people are. I like people and like to be with them."
Fr Breen is now recognised at most Irish courses. even without his Roman collar. At an annual midsummer meeting at Galway races. he celebrates Mass in the parade ring for some 400 people beforehand, a tradition which, he says, is "very well appreciated, especially by the racecourse staff'.
He has also travelled the world as an owner when One Won One, a sprinter owned by the Heavenly Syndicate he heads, raced in England, the United States, Dubai and Hong Kong. The gelding, trained by Joanna Morgan, died last year after it broke a leg on the gallops at its stable.
Eleven years old at the time of the accident, it had pulled in hundreds of thousands of pounds in prize money with more than a dozen wins.
"He's gone to heaven now," said Fr Breen. Is that what really happens to race horses when they die? Fr Breen turns earnest when I'm half-expecting him to make a joke about horses becoming angels. "They are only animals," he said. "They go back to the earth where they came from. It's hard to know what happens to ourselves, never mind animals. We pretend we know a lot about God but we don't; we know very little. If we did know very much, then we wouldn't need to have faith."
Fr Breen obviously enjoys being both a priest and a punter. He is unlikely to change. He will continue to travel to Cheltenham and to furnish the faithful with tips about fast horses, nowadays through his weekly column in the Kildare Post, as well as from the pulpit. The biggest tip he will be giving the Cheltenham faithful today is to be objective and not to back every Irish mount out of St Patrick's Day sentimentality, as "sentimentality is lethal in gambling".
So does the future offer anything new? His biggest hope is that there is a vacancy in heaven that one day he might fill. "If they canonised me," said Fr Breen — with the utmost gravity — "I would be the patron saint of horseracing. That would be the only thing I would be patron saint of... I enjoy it so much."