TL: What was your earliest racing memory and was getting involved with the sport something you always wanted to do?

RO’B: My dad had broodmares when we were kids growing up and he would have raced some of the progeny. This was the way we would have been introduced to the sport. It was an obsession of mine from an early age and my earliest memories would have been going to point-to-points and watching people like Lester Piggott, Pat Eddery and Cool Ground with Adrian Maguire.

TL: You rode for both the late Joe Crowley and Aidan O’Brien early in your riding career, what was that like and what did you learn from both trainers?

RO’B: I rode out for both as a youngster and I was only 15 when I rode out, but it was my first time away from home and being immersed in a racing yard. That was with Joe Crowley and it was a wonderful time.

I was a 15-year-old, away from home working in a yard and, getting to ride horses like Joe had at the time, was just complete heaven. It is easy to look back now and see how successful Aidan and Joe were and their biggest thing was their focus on fitness and keeping things simple.

TL: You made the move to the UK in 2011 to ride for the David O’Meara stable. What was that experience like and were there any differences between race riding in Britain compared to Ireland?

RO’B: I was in David O’Meara’s yard from 2012 to 2015 and it was interesting to see what he was doing. There are massive differences between the Irish racing and English racing scene in the way they campaign their horses and what we call their standard handicappers, in that they can run regularly because there are lots of opportunities for them and they can run themselves in and out of form and up and down the handicap.

Race riding in Britain is different to Ireland and that is down to the culture, with owners expecting their horses to be there. Mark Johnston has pushed the fact that you need to have horses ridden forward in races.

TL: Alan’s Pride ridden by Billy Lee was your first winner as a trainer at Dundalk in January 2017, a month after becoming a trainer in December 2016, how did it feel to train your first winner?

RO’B: It was fantastic and it was a lovely horse to get it with. The horse was owned by a close group of friends of mine. They were friends from racing and we were very interested and intrigued about how the whole thing would go.

He was a well-bred horse and decently handicapped. The horse had some good form as a two-year-old and he lost his form. We got him for very small money and to see him win, he was a terrific horse and we had some great days with him.

TL: What does your daily routine of being a trainer consist of?

RO’B: The most important thing to training racehorses is a good solid consistent routine. It is crucial that the horses are fed the same time every morning and it gets going some time around 6:30am and you have the usual guys, who are keen to get going and the horses are ridden out early and it is important that they are looked after.

It is just a case of getting all the horses exercised and everything tidied until about 1pm and then the yard goes to sleep for a few hours and then it is back again at 3:30pm.

In a busy time, it would be very common for me to ride out seven or eight horses and we would often have two other lads riding out, where we would be going through those numbers.

It is a good, strong busy morning and you do not have to be worrying about what you eat and whether or not you will make it to the gym that evening. It is a lovely way of living and I do not have any traffic jams or commutes.

TL: Do you have a horse to look out for in the stable over the winter on the jumps or the all-weather?

RO’B: Feud is a horse to look out for from my stable this season. He came to us last season as a three-year-old and we were open to the possibility that he might be suitable to go hurdling and he has really taken to it like a duck to water.

He has won his first two races over hurdles and, in terms of what he has achieved thus far, his appetite for jumping and training feels like we have not got to see the ceiling of where he can get to and, hopefully, he can be an interesting horse for the springtime.

TL: In what way do you think racing has changed since you started out as an amateur rider back in the 1990s?

RO’B: The difference is that the standard of horses is being retained in this country. There had been a lull with Ballydoyle from the mid-1980s to the middle of the 1990s and, since Aidan has come in, Ballydoyle has gone to new levels with the standard of horse that we are used to.

The flat, between Joseph, Donnacha, Jessie and Ger Lyons, has been an extraordinary success. Irish racing is the most competitive cauldron in the world and with the National Hunt scene has been getting tougher and tougher and bigger and better with the horses Henry (de Bromhead), Gordon (Elliott) and Willie (Mullins) and Gavin (Cromwell) have been producing year after year.

TL: You qualified as a Dentist from the University College of Cork, in what way has this helped shape your training career?

RO’B: I qualified as a dentist in 2004 and you get trained in the profession, so you work at that for a few years. It did allow my wife and I to be put in a position financially to buy the place I am now training from.

I do not think being a dentist makes too much difference in how you approach training racehorses. However, it is a nice thing to have done and a good thing to have as a fallback.

TL: If there was something in Irish racing you could change, what would it be?

RO’B: There has been talk about the need to level the playing field and about the importance of identifying opportunities for smaller trainers. The only way you are going to level the playing field is if you somehow encourage the super owners to consider the smaller trainers. To annoy them by putting together a programme of exclusively 60 races for trainers who have only had a certain amount of winners in previous seasons is not the way to go.