I WAS brought up with horses all my life. My parents, Geoffrey and Patricia bred and farmed on a small scale. They still do. My dad worked in the Aga Khan’s in the late eighties, early nineties. I suppose I would have gone in with him as a young fella and mucked out a few. I got into it that way. Although I was born in Tipperary, the family had moved to Kildare when I was just three.

Most of my early memories of being around horses would come from that time in my life. We moved back to my mother’s homeland in Tipperary again a few years later, when I was 10. My parents still live there and have a small stud outside Clonmel. Being quite tall, I was never destined to have a career in the saddle but I did learn how to ride at home.