Mischievous Jim Bolger would just love a Derby victory for Mac Swiney

There is more than a single strand of irony attached to the fact a horse named Mac Swiney has a fighting chance of winning the Derby.

One aspect is quite possibly deliberate. Jim Bolger has been known to indulge in a spot of mischief and has never lacked self-confidence. When he named this son of New Approach, it is feasible he was actively contemplating a scenario in which the Derby, that quintessentially English sporting event, might evoke memories of the Irish Republican hunger-striker, Terence MacSwiney, who died in Brixton prison in October 1920.

An unintended irony perhaps is that the self-made Bolger can now aspire to be mentioned in the same breath as the man often described as 'the last of the gentleman trainers', Arthur Budgett, who won the Derby with half-brothers Blakeney (1969) and Morston (1973), rather less provocatively named after coastal villages in Norfolk.