Paul Murphy moved the Animal Health and Welfare (Ban and Hare Coursing) Bill at second stage and urged the public to pressure TDs ahead of a vote next Wednesday. He set out evidence of cruelty, falling hare numbers and public opinion to argue for an immediate ban.
What he argues: Paul Murphy described this as the third Private Members' Bill attempting to end hare coursing, tracing efforts back decades. He cited that more than 65,000 Irish hares have been captured in the last 15 years and stressed the hare's unique cultural and ecological status on the island of Ireland.
Evidence and numbers: Murphy referenced scientific follow-up from the National Parks and Wildlife Service showing much lower survival for coursed hares and pointed to a steep fall in captures-from 5,348 hares ten years ago to 3,124 in 2025-2026. He challenged claims made by coursing advocates about population benefits and criticised what he called 'junk science'.
Politics and public opinion: He accused a well-connected minority of blocking reform in the Oireachtas, criticised whipping practices in parties including Sinn Féin, and noted polling showing overwhelming opposition to hare coursing across urban and rural areas. Murphy compared the situation to previous bans on blood sports and highlighted that hare coursing is already banned in Northern Ireland.
Call to action: Murphy concluded with an appeal to TDs to seek a free vote and to members of the public-rural and urban-to contact their representatives before next Wednesday's vote. He also noted the bill allows for mechanical lewers as an alternative to live hare capture.
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I so move, Chair, and it's an honour to finally be moving this at second stage after the Bill Animal Health and Welfare Ban and Hare Coursing Bill was first introduced in 2020, and it's been a long road getting to this point. This section of the road will finish next Wednesday with a vote, and I'll start and finish with an appeal to the public to get on to your TDs and demand that they reflect the big majority opinion in this country, that we should take this opportunity to ban Hare Coursing. But this road has been going on for a very long time. This is the third Private Members' Bill to attempt to ban the barbaric practice of Hare Coursing. Tony Gregory tried over 30 years ago. Maureen O'Sullivan introduced her Bill in 2015 at first stage and it was voted on at second stage in 2016, and now here we are again 10 years later in 2026, one of only three European countries that still allow this annual torture of the Hare to continue. In the last 15 years more than 65,000 Irish hares have been captured from the wild and forced to participate in barbarism, all because a relatively small number of people enjoy watching animals being absolutely terrorised and some who want to make money from gambling on this torture. The Irish hare is a unique subspecies of mountain hare found only on the island of Ireland. We don't have many unique animals but the hare is one of them. Its cultural status was cemented for many decades in the old Irish three pence coins. It is iconic across Irish folklore where hares were often seen as spirits of the dead, leading to a taboo against eating them. We could do with renewing and broadening that ancient taboo by banning Hare Coursing too. We wouldn't be here at this step of the road debating this today without the tireless and Trojan work of the Irish Council Against Blood Sports, the National Animal Rights Association and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Some of their tireless activists are in the gallery today. Countless dedicated individual activists have stuck with this day in day out over many many years and they are the best of humanity. They know what empathy is. Those who support this cruelty do not. In the last while we've seen Elon Musk, JD Vance and other leading figures in the US far right denouncing empathy, declaring war on empathy. Musk has claimed that quote the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy and that there is quote an empathy exploit. Others are going so far as to talk about the sin of empathy. The vast majority of ordinary people will rightly think that this is bananas. That we have plenty of empathy because empathy is a fundamental part of what makes us human. It allows us to feel solidarity with other human beings including people we don't know, we've never met, we don't look like us and to empathize with animals like the Irish hare. Empathy is our natural reaction when we see videos of big greyhounds 10 times the size, 10 times the weight of greyhounds smashing in to terrified tares, throwing them up into the air, pinning them to the ground and hurting them. Instinctively we feel for the hare and all of the waffle that we have heard in the debates, in the media and presumably we'll hear today from the government benches about rural pursuits is to try to cover up and suppress that instinctive human response. The government TDs, the Sinn Féin TDs know that in their heart of hearts too. I know many of them would vote to ban this barbaric practice if they weren't being whipped into voting for it to continue. We saw with Sinn Féin a few months ago on the issue of fox hunting. TDs were whipped to vote against a ban and then shortly afterwards, thankfully, the Sinn Féin Ardaic voted in favor of a ban and I suspect the same kind of breakdown of the vote at a Sinn Féin Ardaic would happen now in a ban on hare coursing. Sinn Féin members would vote in support of a ban on hare coursing. There are very few people who would support fox hunting and oppose hare coursing or vice versa and you're not, if that is the position, we'll see what the position is, that is not a position that would please anybody. Sinn Féin need to stand up and make the right decision which is to ban hare coursing here just as it is already banned in the north. There should be no more partitionism on this. Hare coursing in this country is a legacy of British colonialism introduced here by the British army. To all those TDs that privately support a ban on hare coursing but will troop through the voting lobbies or more likely press the buttons at the seats to vote against a ban, all you really have is the coward's defense. You're just following orders. I hope that at the very least you will at least try to persuade your party's leaderships that these orders go against public opinion and a free vote should be granted. The public out there is overwhelmingly opposed to hare coursing in both rural and urban areas. There is not an urban-rural divide on this issue despite the attempts to create it into some sort of culture war issue. In fact the Red Sea opinion poll on hare coursing which found 97% of people were opposed to hare coursing actually showed a slightly higher percentage of people in rural areas opposed to it than those in urban areas. 78% in rural compared to 76% in urban. Support for a ban in Munster, the supposed stronghold of hare coursing, was 77% compared to 76% in Dublin. So don't come out and tell me that rural people are the only ones who know about coursing and that they wanted to continue when the evidence suggests that yes they do know about it but precisely because of that they wanted to be stopped because they've been more personally exposed and know the realities of the horrors of this so-called sport. The truth is the vast vast majority of Irish people want hare coursing banned. Only 9% in the Red Sea opinion poll opposed a ban, fewer than 1 in 10 people. It's been banned in the north for over 20 years since 2003 on conservation grounds as well as the appalling cruelty and then the assembly voted to make the ban permanent in 2010. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals supports a ban. The Irish Wildlife Trust support a ban. The NSPCA are the foremost authority in animal welfare in this country and they should be listened to by the government. The supporters of hare coursing may prove to be a majority in this house but they're a tiny minority of the population. It speaks to how out of touch this place is with public opinion and what's happening here is the same thing that's happened with fox hunting. A well-connected minority that want blood sports to continue that enjoy making animals suffer and making money out of it is the tail that is wagging the dog and the result is all sorts of spurious arguments that we'll hear. One of those is that because coursing has gone on for a long time it is somehow all right. The same was true of badger baiting, same was true of wild animals in circuses, the same is true of fur farming, all of which have been rightly banned in this country. We don't have to accept a lazy appeal to tradition for one minute. It's worth noting again from that Red Sea poll from 2019 that over 85% of over 65s supported a ban, so higher than the average support for a ban of 77%. So any notion of a generational divide rooted in tradition is complete nonsense. Just because this cruelty has gone on for a long time does not make it right. In fact it makes it all the more outrageous because it means the scale of the suffering caused to these beautiful animals over decades is truly enormous. Another baseless claim put out by the Irish Coursing Club and their supporters is that coursing areas have significantly higher hare populations than other areas and that this means somehow that coursing protects hares. The mechanism through which this causative link happens is not really explained, but somehow capturing a lot of hares from the wild, putting them into captivity, terrorizing them is apparently good for a hare conservation. The origin for this claim is a tiny sample of 135 hares taken in a small area of East Donegal way back in 2003 which was then compared to a sample of hares in another part of the country four years later in 2007 and then extrapolated to the whole country to say that hares are 18 times more common in coursing areas than non-coursing areas. To be blunt this is junk science. Coursing advocates also claim that coursing doesn't really hurt because the greyhounds now wear muzzles. It's also fake news. First the stress of being hunted with nets, captured and put into crates, held in captivity for months. Unlike rabbits, hares are solitary animals so being kept in confinement with multiple other hares is extremely stressful and unnatural for them. During those months they're being trained which is causing them more stress and terror. And then you have the coursing meeting itself. Two dogs racing to see who is the fastest to turn, pin or catch the hare within which more than four percent of hares are killed. Many more are seriously injured. If they survive all of that they're much more likely to die after being released back into the wild than hares that haven't been coursed. A study funded by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, although it's used by the supporters of hare coursing, it followed up coursed and uncoursed hares and the bottom line finding is that after six months you can only find one out of 20 coursed hares alive compared to eight out of 20 uncoursed hares. But even if you're one of those rare psychopaths like Elon Musk who is devoid of human empathy, who doesn't care about the suffering of other living creatures, it's possible, although perhaps unlikely, that you might still care about biodiversity. You might still care about the survival of the ecosystems upon which we all depend to survive. Unless you're Elon Musk and you're planning to head off to Mars. But for anyone concerned about biodiversity, the impact of coursing on the Irish hare population, You refrain from describing people as psychopaths rather. Even Elon Musk? Even Elon Musk. You can't call Elon Musk a psychopath. Well you can keep saying it over and over again. If you can't say that much, what can you say? I have asked you. Thank you, I'll keep going. To keep in line with the standing orders. Thank you. For anyone concerned about biodiversity, the impact of coursing on the Irish population should be a major concern. The National Parks and Wildlife Service study indicates an eight times lower survival rate for hares after they're released from coursing. That's a significant additional stressor on wild hare populations which are already in decline, along with most of our other native species. Those involved in the practice of coursing, those involved in capturing the hares each year, they know that. Because every year they're capturing fewer and fewer hares to be terrorized. When I first introduced this bill, I was talking about over 5,000 captured a year. Now it's over 3,000 captured a year. One report of a coursing meeting in Rosebury County, Kildare in December 2024 says only two hares ran. Hare stock low this year. Data from the Irish Coursing Club shows this steep decline in the number of captured hares. Ten years ago 5,348 hares were caught compared to 3,124 in 2025-2026, a fall of 41 percent. Coursing was first halted in the north in 2002 because of evidence that hare populations there had declined by 25 percent. Yet here in the south it is allowed to continue seemingly no matter what. Of course there's lots of reasons why hare numbers are falling. Intensification and industrialization of agriculture has increased the use of heavy machinery that can kill and injure hares. There's also much greater numbers of dairy cattle in particular and a reduction in the natural variety of grasses for hares to eat due to limited varieties of grasses being sown to increase milk yields. On top of that, RHD, rabbit hemorrhagic disease, has ravaged rabbit and hare populations across Europe with a new more deadly strain, RHD2, first detected in England and Wales in 2014. But you would think that all of that might have prompted at least a temporary ban to protect this supposedly protected species. That's one of the really ironic things in this is that the law that says that hares are a protected species in turn then goes on to say well you can get a license to capture them and to chase after them with big dogs. But of course the gambling industry and the coursing and greyhound industry took precedence and will be the final nail in the coffin for many hares. I've heard today for the first time, so I'm intrigued it may come up in the debate, I'm going to ask in advance, but I've heard the claim today that the industry is worth 70 million euros annually to the Irish economy. And I'd like to know where does this figure come from? I looked for it online, I couldn't find any source for this figure. The greyhound industry is usually said to be worth 120 million euros. So I don't, and there's creative accounting happening in that figure, but I don't understand where this figure of 70 million or what study is being referred to. And I do suspect is what's happening is more creative accountancy that takes no account of the damage caused to families and communities by the scourge of gambling and gambling addiction. I would point out that the bill is explicit in allowing for lewer coursing, in other words having a mechanical hare as happens in Australia. I'll just finish with two points. One, an appeal to members of this house to put pressure on their parties, to fight for a free vote and to vote in any case with their conscience. Not to vote to allow this cruel practice to continue. And then finally an appeal to those outside of this house, the ordinary decent people, rural and urban, who oppose this practice. The vote will be next Wednesday. We have time to build pressure and pressure and pressure on TDs and parties to take this opportunity to stop hare coursing. Thank you.
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