Pigeon racing in Dublin is a serious business and with wildlife groups, Dublin airport and avian flu as potential enemies, they need competent people at the helm. Paschal bought his first pigeon aged ten on Capel Street in a small bird shop that’s now a Filipino food store. He started breeding them as a teenager. “I’d bring a half dozen down to Capel Street of a Saturday to sell and they’d be back at the house that evening. I trained them to climb out of the trap. We all did that to make a bit of extra cash.” Pigeons range in price from a few euro to almost half a million euro. The General – “as quiet as a mouse,” according to Paschal – used to walk into bird shops, ask to see the most expensive ones and then buy every one of them.
“When you hear about the terrible violence he done,” Paschal says, “it’s hard to imagine him being a pigeon man.” Paschal, who has been racing pigeons for fifty-nine years, is the oldest pigeon fancier in Dublin. His club, the Northside Homing Pigeon Club is the oldest club in Dublin. As you’d imagine, there are a couple of taxis in the car park but there are some motors that’d probably feel more at home in a managing director’s parking spot rather than the forecourt of a pigeon club off the Clonliffe Road too. Everyone assures me there isn’t much money to be made in pigeon racing.
“Money doesn’t come into it,” they insist. “Fellas want to win. You want to go in and see your name up on the board.” In the big races, fanciers can win cars and cash prizes but in the smaller club events the cash prizes are much smaller and organised on a pools basis so everyone has a greater chance of winning something. The big money in pigeon racing is in the breeding. Champion racers are regularly sold to studs in Europe and Asia, and can go for a quarter of a million each.
The club is full of characters. There’s an elderly Italian gent who is the long lost nephew of the real Don Corleone, another guy who they refer to as Kirk Douglas’s body double and then Heno, the José Mourinho of the Northside pigeon-racing league – a man who has
studied the art of breeding and employed the latest technology to get the best form from his birds. Form, in a nutshell, is horniness: the hornier you can get a bird the faster it flies home. Cocks are separated from hens for long periods.
They are allowed to see each through the wire meshing in their lofts but they’re not allowed to touch. In some cases, they are shown their partners having sex with other birds to drive them mad with jealousy. Science, feeding and all manner of psychological trickery are employed to get the best out of a bird but at the end of the day it’s the pigeon most desperate to get some that wins the race. They fly at speeds of over one hundred kilometres an hour and in cross-channel races for as long as two days, just for a few minutes of passion back at the loft with their feathered lover. It’s a tactic used by most football managers, but some of the pigeons don’t get any for over a month – try suggesting that to a footballer or a footballer’s wife. All the birds are tested for banned substances. In Belgium, the birthplace of pigeon fancying, birds have tested positive for anabolic steroids, synthetic hormones and analgesics – the exact same drugs found in human athletes.
