Rachael Blackmore being awarded RTÉ Sportsperson of the Year and BBC's World Sportsperson of the Year is an insult to true sportspeople everywhere.
The Tipperary woman became the first Irish person to scoop both awards and can be regarded among Ireland's sport's best-regarded athletes.
The only problem is that while Blackmore is clearly an impressive person and athlete, she is not a sportsperson by any measure.
Horse racing is not, and will never be, a sport. You can dress is up any way you want. The best jockeys are in great physical condition. It's still not a sport.
Riding a horse and forcing them to run races against their will might be many things, but it's not sport.
The second you sit on top of an animal, grab the reins that have been placed on them and force them to do whatever you feel like doing, it has ceased to be sport. It's abuse.
The Irish Government supplied €77 million of taxpayers' money to the horse racing industry in 2021. The comparable figure in 2022 will be €70.4 million.
Greyhound racing, which is so small that most bookmakers only run markets on the biggest markets, will receive around €14 million next year.
None of it defensible.
To put the figure into context, the FAI, who control by far the biggest sport in Ireland, will receive in the region of €6 million in Government funding next year.
Buttons, in other words.
The vast majority of sports funding in Ireland, in other words, is invested in the exploitation of innocent animals who cannot consent.
It's bad enough that our Government has decided that the financial windfall from a gambling industry that ruins the lives of many should be invested back into that same industry.
But what's even worse is they'll slap us in the face and tell us that this is what we should be proud of.
There is absolutely nothing to be proud of about Ireland dominating an industry that relies on exploiting animals.
No more than we should be proud of Ireland being a world-beater in not taxing multinationals at the expense of the rest of the world.
In decades to come, our children will ask us how we let the shame of the horse and greyhound racing to happen and we'll have to tell them what we didn't do to stop it.
