Mr. Brian Kavanagh:

I answered Deputy D'Arcy's question about my own situation. It is clear that I have tried to do what is right for Irish racing during my career and I have given a commitment that I will not seek another contract, which is in the minutes of a board meeting. I have a passion for Irish racing and it is dear to my heart. However, I fully accept the need for change at senior levels so we have put in place a new management structure, which is designed to bring new blood and new thinking to the senior management team. We will hopefully fill places in that structure in the near future and it is proposed to allow the new people to be contenders for the position of chief executive, although that does not mean the appointment will be from within the organisation. The timing for this has been approved by the board.

I do not believe that the chairman and I engineered our reappointment. Everybody acted with the best of intentions, and it must be remembered that there was a hiatus in Government for five months, at a critical time, and there was no Minister between February and May. The appointment of the chief executive is a matter for the board and that was approved by the board. It was not the intention to do this without telling anyone. The chairman told the committee that he wanted to ascertain the position of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform before going back to the board.

I certainly have no intention of engineering anything. As I said to Deputy D'Arcy earlier, I would have been more than happy to compete for the position and if I was successful, fine and if I was not successful, I would accept that. I have competed previously and I think that would be fair. That was the basis on which I was appointed in 2009. The concern about my contract was the fact in 2011, this clause was removed from the contract which I signed noting my concern because it is very difficult for a chief executive to be in dispute with a Department that is providing funding to the industry and I would not want my contract to be a block to that relationship.

I cannot disclose matters relating to the media rights deal. The Deputy asked for HRI's other sources of income. They are in our annual report and Ms Eade will be quite happy to go through it with the Deputy. HRI generates about €5 million from the media rights deal. The bulk of the deal goes to race courses but it would be inappropriate for me to disclose the value of it because it is a commercially sensitive area. Mr. Morris and I negotiated it together with the chief executive of the Association of Irish Racecourses, Paddy Walsh. That was effectively over a three or four-month period and required a lot of knowledge and understanding of the media landscape in the UK and the time to take the right opportunity. As I said earlier, there is a race course group in the UK that has no media rights deal so there was a day when no pictures from that group were shown in any betting shops in Great Britain, Ireland or any of the betting shops owned by three of the major chains because they had not concluded a deal. If we were in that position, it would render the race courses very vulnerable so the legislation requires HRI to negotiate the media rights. That is because one will always maximise the value one gets for those rights by selling them as a package rather than Punchestown thinking it can do one deal and Listowel thinking it can do another one. That came under the guise of the HRI media rights committee. The executive work was done by Mr. Morris and I along with the chief executive of the Association of Irish Racecourses. It was a tender process with interested parties so we invited applications from the various interested parties.