SEAMUS Hughes Kennedy arrived home from a very brief, and well deserved, holiday on Wednesday only to be greeted in the kitchen of the family’s beautiful Kilkenny home by media from The Irish Field and RTÉ. One gets the feeling the 20-year-old would rather just get on with riding his horses but he is as polite and accommodating as ever to the media pack.

That’s what happens when you win double gold at the FEI European Championships for Young Riders; everyone wants a piece of you. After changing out of his summer clothes, having come from hotter climates, he joins us in the kitchen along with his parents Clare and Melvyn, all smiles.

This is a self-made story of success. Yes ‘Seamie’, as he is known to his family and friends, hails from one of the most famous show jumping dynasties in the country, but every one of his successes (and there have been many) have a common theme – they have all come aboard a pony or horse he has made from scratch himself. He has an undeniable talent and, at a young age, is producing quality young Irish horses to win at the highest level of the sport.

Take ESI Rocky, the horse who won double gold at last month’s Europeans as an eight-year-old; he was purchased from Clare’s cousin Andrew Hughes just down the road at Ennisnag Stud as a two-year-old. It was a similar story for Cuffesgrange Cavaildam, the pony that put Seamus on the map by winning the FEI Jumping Trophy and taking him to his first Europeans.

That mare, who was bred to be a horse but never grew, is the dam of Cuffesgrange Cavadora who a young Seamus produced from a “hardy” three-year-old to win the WBFSH FEI World Championships for Young Horses in Lanaken as a seven-year-old, just weeks after he had turned 17. He has an impressive strike rate.

Slower start

That is especially for a rider who was somewhat later than many of his teammates starting out in the game. “I always rode a bit at Warrington Equestrian Centre, Eddie Moloney’s place, and did some Pony Club stuff but it was really until I was about 12 when I start doing the hunter trials and getting properly into it. It didn’t really get off to a great staff, I had a few falls!” Seamus tells The Irish Field with a laugh.

“I got my first pony from Done Deal and it started going from there. I was very lucky then we bought Cuffesgrange Cavilidam early on in my career when I was only around 13 or 14, as a nearly unbroken broodmare. She had the saddle on her but she hadn’t done too much at all. She ended up turning out to be one of the best ponies in Europe.

“Within two years she was at the Europeans with me, then we sold her to the Wachmans and Max went on to win the individual gold and individual silver the two years following that.

“We asked the breeder [Eamonn Sheehan] if he has any siblings of Cavalidam and we ended up buying her daughter, Cavadora, as a practically untouched, unhandled three-year-old. She was a tough cookie as a young horse, but she ended up at the World Champion a few years later as a seven-year-old.”

Champions: Seamus Hughes Kennedy and ESI Rocky with their two gold medals at home in Co Kilkenny \ Claire Nash

Hughes dynasty

Hughes Kennedy Showjumping is located in Danesfort, Co Kilkenny in the middle of the Hughes family dynasty. The house was built only 10 years ago, although so beautifully done it feels like an old Georgian home, while paddocks full of youngstock line the drive way up to the newly built arenas and stables, a project done during Covid. Looking out the window of the kitchen, the European champion ESI Rocky gazes out one window from his stable, while adjacent to him is the world champion Cuffesgrange Cavadora; it’s a nice view of two special Irish horses.

Clare’s sister is of course Olympic show jumper Marion Hughes who is based at the ‘home’ farm of Hughes Horse Stud (HHS), just five minutes up the road. Clare rode to a high level herself, until her studies and businesses took over. She has founded three successful pharmaceutical companies: CF Pharma, a developer of pharmaceutical and veterinary products, and NutriScience, a producer of nutraceuticals for the veterinary market, which she sold to the Belgian veterinary pharmaceutical company, Ecuphar, while she is currently CEO of Telenostic, based in Kilkenny.

Seamus Hughes Kennedy with his parents, Clare Hughes and Melvyn Kennedy at their home in Danesfort, Co Kilkenny with European champion ESI Rocky (ISH) \ Claire Nash

“We founded NutriScience in 2010, and then I became an R&D director for the mother company which is an SME out of Brugge in Belgium. I was their global head for research of pharma and medical devices. It didn’t work fantastically well for me working not for myself so I started CA Pharma in 2015 and we have three separate companies now in Kilkenny, a company called Telenostics, that looks at resistance and parasites in horses, which is really interesting.

“There’s an American delegation from Enterprise Ireland coming over to Dublin Horse Show next week, an equine veterinary delegation so I’m involved in that. There are some really interesting people from the larger veterinary centres and IVC Evidensia which are the largest veterinary group in Europe.”

On of seven children, six of whom are directly involved in the industry, Clare’s riding career petered out after her father, Seamus, died prematurely. “I did horses with my father and Marion at home. He died at Marion’s first international show in Lucerne in Switzerland. He got to see her jump one international class, he was quite young, only in his 50s when he died. It wasn’t my core focus after that and there probably wasn’t the support network to do the horses that there had been when he was there,” Clare explained.

Despite focusing on her career, horses were always there and when the children came along, Clare and Melvyn got back into it in a big way. Seamus is the eldest of four children, followed by Isobel, Chloe and Annie.

“Seamie was the impetus to bring it forward here. For the last four or five years we were trying to make it more and more professional and have a pipeline of young horses coming through. It’s very difficult to buy them, and it’s difficult to breed them, but we have a very good hinterland of a support network between all the family and Ger O’Neill who is a bit like family to be honest.

“We are breeding probably around 10 foals a year. A lot of them are out of that Cuffesgrange Cavadora family, and a lot of those are related to Tom Brennan’s horses - so the MHS horses and Marion’s horses [HHS] and ours, there’s a link between them all.”

Double gold

Seamus laughs when his mother says she was “proud and a bit shocked” following his individual gold medal at last month’s European Championships for Young Riders. “Originally it was Cavadora that was to go there, then it was ESI Ali who was sold and Rocky was the third choice. But he is a fantastic horse, he’s got a massive engine on him which was needed over there. He’s very sharp but he actually has a good brain once you get him working with you, he wants to work with you.

“So I’m massively proud and massively shocked still, a bit of both! I shouldn’t have been so shocked and Seamie was much more in the zone than I was,” Clare said.

Seamus however takes it all in his stride and has now earned a place in the international classes at Dublin next week, his first five-star show. He will take Rocky, who was qualified in the seven and eight-year-olds, and Cavadora.

“I got the Young Rider wild card from the Europeans and thanks to Michael Blake for making it happen. I am looking forward to jumping in my first five-star,” Seamus said, calm and collected as ever. “I’d like to try and get on one of the three-star Nations Cups towards the end of the year, hopefully I can. Mum always wanted to go to Geneva for the Under-25 classes so we would like to make that happen.

“And then hopefully we can try make a few shapes next year and jump a five-star Nations Cup and hopefully make it back for the Aga Khan one year if I can… sooner rather than later hopefully!”

Chloe is also qualified for next week’s horse show in the 148cm jumping class with HK Zena, while youngest of the family, Annie, is aiming to make her debut in 2024. Isobel, who won a European silver medal in the Children on Horses in 2018 is following in the footsteps of her mother and is studying pharmaceutical healthcare in Dublin so, while her riding has taken a back seat, she is a good support to her older brother.

Future plans

It’s tough work running a yard at the age of 20, ably assisted by his first cousin and yard manager Hugh McOwan, as well as a great team. Was college ever on the cards for Seamus? “It was I suppose. I always did very well in school and got a good Leaving Cert. I was hoping to get the Ad-Astra scholarship in UCD to accommodate doing college and horses together but I tried for two years and I never got it. So then I kind of said I don’t have enough time to go to college and do the horses the way I want to do them.

“We had plenty of nice young stock and I don’t think I would have got the work into those two eight-year-olds, ESI Ali and ESI Rocky, to win all the classes they have this year, if I hadn’t been able to give it my full focus. But I’m happy, I love horses and that’s what I want to do now. Maybe I’ll try go and do a course now or something myself.”

His mother adds: “I didn’t really mind what he did. I’ve gone the long way around in trying to do business in order to be able to do horses. But to be honest you have only one life to live so if you can make, if you can actually have a business doing something you love, that’s the panacea I think, for anybody.

“I’d love him to do a course and I’d love him to continue to be educated, I think it’s massive. I think the RDS Bursary, Showjumping Ireland, HSI all need to try to continue to teach riders to be businesspeople as well as horses because one does not live in isolation of the other. So I think it’s really important that they continue that, I want Seamie to continue with education, we were looking at London School of Economics to do a couple of courses and I really want him to do that.”

As they look forward to next week, Clare sums up what Dublin means to the equestrian community in Ireland, saying: “It’s a bit like watching one of those feel-good movies, you come out punching the air thinking this is where I’m going to be next year. It’s a social event as well, you get to meet the people you haven’t met for a year.

“It’s also a business centre and really probably one of the challenges for us over the next year or two is to make this business-centric, so that it can support itself in terms of, if you want to compete at the high level, it’s constant reinvestment back into the sport and I suppose that’s what we are trying to do in terms of our young horses and production.

“You want to compete in the Aga Khan number one, and Olympics, and then Rome, Rotterdam all of those… so that’s where you want to go and if you can do that on your own home-bred horses well then that’s even better.”