AS I sit at the kitchen island in Lisa Cawley’s home, a chesnut mare with a big white blaze passes up and down past the large glass doors.

Lisa’s home overlooks a big green meadow, home to Golden Exchange, the aforementioned chesnut, as well as other household names in Glimmering, Cruise Leaf and Moygara Rose.

A walk through the fields reveals a beautiful bunch of young horses - yearlings and two-year-olds in one meadow, and eight confident three-year-olds in another – all just turned out earlier that week and enjoying the spring weather. Lisa lights up as she talks about her horses, just like her father, the late Dr Noel Cawley, always did.

It’s almost eight years since I last walked through these fields, that day with Noel. “Not a huge amount has changed,” Lisa says.

“We still have the same broodmares that Dad would have been working with, and we’ve some of their daughters, so the pedigrees are much the same.”

There are 40 horses at the Eadestown farm, including 13 broodmares. It’s a busy hobby for Lisa, a partner in a Dublin law firm, who was always hugely involved in the breeding programme with her father. Following his passing in 2023, Lisa and her husband Joe Hynes, a finance director at ADM, have taken over the reins.

The success for the Cawley family over the years has been plentiful, none more so than in recent times. Dublin championship wins, Breeders’ Classic victories, Studbook Series success and the biggest of all, a silver medal at the 2023 WBFSH World Breeding Championships for Young Horses in Lanaken, a first for the family, poignantly coming three months after Noel had passed.

Olympic buyer

That silver medal came from the then six-year-old mare Laurina, a daughter of one of the matriarchs of the farm, Rincarina. By Cruising out of Diamond Ballerina (Diamond Lad), Rincarina is home-bred by the Cawleys and was a prolific winner up to 1.55m level with Greg Broderick.

A few weeks before taking silver in Lanaken with Leah Stack, Laurina emulated her dam when winning the six-year-old Championship at the 2023 Dublin Horse Show, just as she had done a year earlier when winning the five-year-olds and the Irish Breeders’ Classic. She was a winning machine from the get-go and it was getting harder to ignore the interest she had garnered.

Eventually, when five-time USA Olympic medallist McLain Ward called, Lisa decided to sell the mare. Just three weeks ago, they won a 1.40m at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Florida.

Leah Stack and Laurina won a silver medal at the WBFSH World Breeding Championship for Young Horses in 2023. She has since been sold to McLain Ward \ Hippo Foto Media - Dirk Caremans

Was it a hard decision to make? “In fairness, it was an easy, and the sensible, decision but it wasn’t really the one I wanted to make. I’d love to have brought her back for breeding, but you don’t get an opportunity like that very often to sell to an Olympic rider who will hopefully help her achieve her potential and it is beneficial to our breeding programme. We still have Rincarina breeding and more daughters coming through,” Lisa says.

Coming through now is the lightly-produced seven-year-old Carina (For Pleasure) who had just left Kildare to go to Broderick’s Ballypatrick Stables to be produced for the season. She will be retained for breeding, as will the beautiful chesnut yearling filly by Don’t Touch Tiji who is happily grazing on the morning of our visit.

A chesnut yearling filly by Don't Touch Tiji out of Rincarina (right); and a boy colt by Diarado out of Pewit Dezette \ Claire Nash

Lisa owns another three Rincarina offspring in partnership with Greg and Cheryl Broderick – a four-year-old gelding by Rock N Roll Ter Putte, a two-year-old gelding by Jericho de Hus and a yearling filly by the same sire. She’s not in foal this year but, on the day of the yard visit, was down in Ballypatrick’s breeding wing.

Nations Cup pedigrees

The 22-year-old mare Cruise Leaf (Cruising out of Ballinakill Clover, by Clover Hill) looks a picture, as does her 16-year-old daughter Glimmering (Loughahoe Guy) who jumped up to 1.45m and is the first mare due to foal in the coming days to Zirocco Blue.

Cruise Leaf is also the dam of 1.60m and Nations Cup performer Ballypatrick Flamenco (Je T’Aime Flamenco) who the Cawleys bred and is now jumping with the Dominican Republic’s Juan Jose Bancalari Elmudesi.

Bred from the same mare, Ballinakill Clover, is Golden Exchange (1.60m, by Cruising) and Lexi Lady (by Flexible) who is the dam of Luisa. The seven-year-old Luisa was one of the Cawley family’s flag bearers last season winning the HSI/DAFM Studbook Series for six-year-olds, as well as qualifying for the finals in Dublin and Lanaken. She was the subject of a lovely video with Noel during the 2021 RDS National Championships when she finally gave the family their first ever three-year-old loose jumping win in Dublin.

The other main breeding line at the Cawley farm is Irco Rain, dam of Winter Cruise (Cruising), and the Flexible full-sisters Flexi Rain and Flexicat, currently in the breeding programme. The three mares are half-sisters to the now-retired 1.60m Nations Cup horses Mullaghdrin Touch The Stars (Michael Duffy) and Touchable (Jessie Drea), both by Touchdown.

Two-year-old filly by Conthargos x Golden Exchange \ Claire Nash

Partnership

That Ballypatrick partnership comes up often and has been longstanding – Noel was one of Greg’s very first owners – and Lisa is grateful for the relationship.

“It must be coming up on 20 years. We’re really lucky to be involved with Greg and Cheryl, it makes a massive difference on both the breeding and sport side.

“It’s one thing to breed a really nice foal, it’s a whole other challenge to get it to the point where it can achieve its potential. They do an amazing job at producing them, it is so professional. We wouldn’t have had the results we have without Greg and Cheryl and their team.

“I think breeders can get a little bit isolated in that you are just at home breeding, looking after your mares and foals and maybe not able to get out to shows and have engagement with riders and producers. I think for us, we are really lucky to be able to put some horses into the sport, assess them at an older age, see what are their quirks, their characteristics, are they balanced and rideable, are they scopey, careful?

“It really helps you then when you’re trying to figure out what to cover the mare with because maybe the last match didn’t work. Greg is a unique in that he is so knowledgeable on both the breeding and the sport side and, for us, partly why it’s come on a bit in the last eight or 10 years is that we’ve kept more horses. Years ago, Dad would have sold more as young horses but once he retired, we were able to start keeping them in the sport and that gives us the opportunity to see how they develop, assess what we have and try build depth in the pedigrees,” Lisa explained.

Viability

Lisa and Joe have plenty to juggle with full-times jobs and two boys aged five and nine, but they are dedicated to keep improving and evolving. “We are pretty much following the same model, which is keep them until three or four, assess them, then some will be sold. We’ll select the fillies that we like most with stronger pedigrees and retain those, produce them, try and put more performance into them, and then bring them back.

“The whole point of what we are trying to do, and Dad was doing the same, is to put generational depth into it. We want to try and get more performance into the fillies we keep so that we’ve a few layers of blacktype.

“We don’t really sell as foals, but we sell some at three and four and over the last few years, we’ve probably been selling more older horses.”

They include Laurina, BP Casablanca (Casall – Cruise Leaf) and Emerald Mystique (Emerald out of Overruled, Cruising) winner of the 2021 seven-year-old RDS National Championships (Dublin) and whose full-sister, the five-year-old mare Emmeline, is beginning her jumping career this season.

Another sold was the Winter Cruise daughter Go Lightly (For Pleasure) who was third in the five-year-olds at Dublin in 2021, now jumping 1.40m in Sweden, and whom Lisa has a four-year-old daughter of by Conthargos, owned with the Brodericks.

Lisa Cawley with some of her exciting three-year-olds by Aganix, Casall, Chacoon Blue, Mylord Carthago and Jorado \ Claire Nash

New pedigrees

“The other thing we will do is invest in some new lines. We have bought a mare called Pewit Dezessete; she’s a half-sister to Stakkato Gold by Luidam. She’s already bred a nice horse called KPCM Hugo Boss, and he qualified for Dublin at four and five with Rhys Williams. We have a Diarado yearling from her and she is in foal again, so over the next few years, we will probably try and buy some new fillies.”

As foaling season approaches, the mares will move to Christy Harte to foal down while Lisa’s cousin Jonathan Cawley, a vet at Anglesea Lodge, does all the reproductive work and, as well as Patrick Doyle who looks after the day to day operations and D.J. O’Sullivan who does a fantastic job breaking the youngsters, Lisa says they are all a crucial part of the team, as is her mum, Anita, who lives just over the hedge.

Hobby

Lisa is a self-confessed show jumping and horse breeding addict, but the operation, despite the huge success, will always be a hobby. “I love the breeding side; I absolutely love making the plans and picking out what crosses work and what hasn’t worked. But I equally love the sports side, I love going to watch the horses jump and I get so much pleasure out of seeing the horses going nicely and jumping comfortably. We jump them as much for the enjoyment because breeding is wonderful but it’s hard work.

“While it is a hobby, we can’t stand still, we need to keep improving and evolving to meet an ever developing industry and try to breed modern, well bred, athletic and rideable horses to meet the market.”

Memories

There have been so many good days and happy memories for the Cawley family, so it’s a difficult question to answer when asked about the highlights over the recent few years. Days that stand out include the 2021 Dublin qualifiers when three home-bred mares - Emerald Mystique (7yo), Lissadell (6yo) and Go Lightly (5yo) - won all three classes at The Meadows. “Dad was really proud that day,” Lisa remembers.

“But I think Rincarina and Laurina and what they have achieved; Rincarina winning in Dublin as a six-year-old, winning numerous National Grand Prix classes and then coming back into the breeding programme and breeding Laurina who basically went out and started winning from nearly her second show.

“I just think it’s a really nice story to have a mother and daughter who both won the six-year-olds, and then to go and win a silver medal and win the Breeders’ Classic as well with Laurina.

“Lanaken was just amazing, a dream for any breeder. And it really helps because you think we must be doing something right. It gives you a bit of motivation.

“And what was lovely that day in Lanaken was the World Breeding Federation issued a list of the top breeders of the horses in the final. And in first was Schockemöhle, and then Noel Cawley as the next breeder with two horses in the finals.

“Schockemöhle breed thousands of horses every year, we are just a small breeding operation... that was really cool.”

Noel Cawley left a lasting legacy on the sport horse industry in Ireland, and that looks to be in very safe hands with his daughter Lisa and Joe at the helm.