Shark Hanlon: 'I'm a nice, gentle shark - but I don't think the bookies like to see me coming!'

It depends where exactly you start counting from but it is currently estimated that there are between 500 and 1,000 species of shark living on our planet. They come in all shapes and sizes.

At one end of the spectrum, the dangerous end, you will find the fearsome man-eating Great White – the one that chewed on Robert Shaw and his boat at the end of Jaws. At the other end are the gentler types, basking sharks for instance, who spend their days cruising languidly along the west coast of Ireland, smiling mouths wide open and a hazard to nobody unless you happen to be a plankton or some other type of poor invertebrate.

Elsewhere on that spectrum lies the Bagenalstown 'flame-haired shark', a creature so rare and exotic that only one has ever been spotted in the wild. John Joseph ‘Shark’ Hanlon, to give him his full scientific name, hunts from the same part of Carlow as Willie Mullins and after decades of toil, sweat and elbow grease he is fast becoming an overnight success at training racehorses.