As you read this, the Galway Races are more than half over and chances are that Willie Mullins is on course to win at least 10 – he’s had a total of 28 over the past three years.

The scary part is that most of Mullins’ runners at Galway are his B team – he keeps the best horses for the winter months and spring festivals.

Personally, I’ve no problem with Mullins, Gordon Elliott, Henry de Bromhead and Gavin Cromwell dominating Irish jump racing. All four of them built up their training operations from a low base and I’d rather the best horses were trained here than in Britain.

It’s just not realistic to expect wealthy racehorse owners to distribute their expensive purchases among smaller trainers, if all the statistics tell them that they are far more likely to get a Cheltenham winner if they have a horse with one of the big four.

However, Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) can see that jump racing is becoming increasingly uncompetitive – recent statistics showed that the total number of National Hunt entries for the first six months of 2024 had fallen by almost 10% and the total number of runners was down 7%.

Quite a few times senior HRI officials have been tackled on this subject by politicians at Oireachtas Committee meetings. Why is so much prize money being won by so few people, they ask, and what are you going to do about it?

Well, now HRI has come up with a plan.

In 2025, there will be 60 jumps races confined to trainers who have had less than 50 Irish jumps winners in either of the last two full Irish National Hunt seasons. This rules out entries from the big four trainers named above.

This new series of races is not going to cure all ills, but it will provide opportunities for smaller yards to have more winners

Races in this series will include bumpers, maiden hurdles, beginners’ chases and handicap hurdles. It will incorporate a similar series of 17 races, which currently identifies opportunities for trainers with defined levels of success over previous seasons.

Ryan McElligott, chief executive of the Irish Racehorse Trainers Association, welcomed the initiative.

“We’re seeing a very large percentage of National Hunt trainers who are struggling – that is what they are telling me and the statistics back that up. You only have to look back at the small field sizes we had for some National Hunt races in January, the height of the season.

"The weather may have been poor, but the problem goes deeper than that. This new series of races is not going to cure all ills, but it will provide opportunities for smaller yards to have more winners and perhaps they can use that momentum to take their operations to the next level.”

It will be interesting to see how it goes.

You’d imagine some shrewd operators like Emmet Mullins, Joseph O’Brien, Noel Meade and Charles Byrnes will be putting a ring around those restricted races in the Irish Racing Calendar, licking their lips at easy pickings.

And, in fairness to J.P. McManus, he has horses spread all over the country and will likely win a fair few of them too.

I’d tend to agree with John Fitzgerald of the Restricted Trainers Association who thinks the new races should have been restricted to trainers who have had no more than 20 winners in a season.

But at least HRI will be able to tell the politicians they tried something, so box ticked, for now.