Dr. Lynn Hillyer:

I will run through a few points very briefly and then members are welcome to ask questions. I started with the Turf Club in its new role of chief veterinary officer and head of anti-doping in September 2016 so I have not been in post for very long. However, I come from a background of regulation in horse racing. I have been an equine vet for 20 years, and between ten and 12 of those years were in horse racing. I have specialist expertise in equine internal medicine and anti-doping and I sit on various international committees. I hope to bring that knowledge to the new role.

I will start by going back to basics, namely, why one needs an anti-doping strategy. Again, I am very conscious of the expertise in the room. Drugs are one of the major threats to the perception of horse racing and animal sports in general worldwide. I attended a conference earlier this year tackling doping in sport and it is clearly a threat to all sports, particularly at the moment.

In animal sports we need an anti-doping strategy for reason of integrity and welfare but there is also a social responsibility, for example, where antimicrobial medications are involved. Horse racing and greyhound racing have for decades differentiated between therapeutic and doping drugs but in racing horses, as in any other animal, the use of both types of drug have to be controlled. They ought to be controlled because misuse of a therapeutic drug can result in consequences as serious as a doping drug, but also because in the public eye a drug is a drug.

In Ireland and Britain this came to the fore in 2013 to 2014 with scandals involving widespread misuse of anabolic steroids in horses in training. That gave us a flavour of what can go wrong. Following on from that in racing and horse racing, the Irish thoroughbred industry anti-doping task force was set up. That was a group that comprised stakeholder representatives and it worked hard for approximately 18 months and reported in February 2016. I included with my written submission a summary of the report, the consensus statement. The upshot is that there is no doubt about the agreement within horse racing that this is an important issue that needs to be tackled and there is a commitment for it to be tackled by the stakeholders. The stakeholders range from breeders to trainers to owners and those in HRI and the Turf Club.

There was a wide-ranging set of recommendations but I summarised them for the purposes of our discussion. The first relates to the laboratory. The key recommendation is terms of the laboratory is that it needed to be in Ireland for a number of reasons, and it needed to meet best international analytical standards. That would be backed up by a dedicated anti-doping unit to oversee developments and co-ordinate future strategy. The creation of my role was part of that.

A lifetime ban would be handed down for animals found to contain substances prohibited at all times. Anabolic steroids were specifically mentioned. Increased testing would be introduced for horses off the racecourse, which is known as out-of-competition testing, and testing would be introduced at all stages of a horse’s life. It is fair to say that up until this point, worldwide, there has been a great focus on what happens to the animals during training but not so much focus on what happens with them both within training when they are not being actively exercised or during the brief periods when they have an injury or disease, and also before and after training, which incorporates the sales and stud side of matters, but also what happens to race horses when they have completed their racing career.

The introduction of testing at those stages, namely, sales, stud and out-of-training were specifically identified. The word "intelligence" is used a lot in the sphere of anti-doping and as I am sure members are aware, in this context means processed information, reliable information or assessed information that can be used to direct anti-doping strategy. A commitment was made by the task force to exchange such information because clearly, information that relates, for example, to harness racing or greyhound racing can have real implications for horse racing and vice versa. The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine was very keen to promote the exchange of information.

Last, but by no means least, in terms of the recommendations of the task force is education. That includes a clear explanation of what anti-doping is and what it is not, what the strategy is, what the rules are and then to have explanatory guidelines, policies and processes. Those task force recommendations, which were made just over a year ago, have formed the basis of our evolving strategy within the Turf Club on the anti-doping side. I will try to summarise the position prior to questions. We must have fair, consistent, science-based principles and we have heard something about that in the past hour or so. Those principles, and following them through are utterly dependent upon having a world-class laboratory and they also require significant expertise and management of the results, data and processes before and after the samples are obtained.

Increased testing throughout a thoroughbred's life is important. It has been said previously that to get the right sample from the right horse at the right time, it is no longer good enough to purely take a single sample from a horse, for example, post race. We need to take samples at different times of the day, different times of the year and different stages of a horse's career. We recognise that. That links in very much with the traceability that has been talked about a lot and we too face challenges on traceability.

We have to maximise whatever resources we have. I have already mentioned intelligence, which clearly comes from other sports. The Management of Intelligence and Drugs Action in Sports, MIDAS, group has been set up and in my brief time in this role, I have seen benefits from that intelligence sharing group with the greyhound industry and others. Other organisations that play an important role include the Department in particular. We all face the same challenges domestically and internationally. I spoke to a colleague in Australia yesterday. I have also been in touch with colleagues in Hong Kong and many other places. We have the same issues and we are sharing information more than ever.

Last but by no means least, we must be accountable, understandable and accessible. It is no longer good enough to make the rules and just dish out sanctions. There must be a huge amount of work upfront to make sure those rules are understood and perhaps more importantly the principles behind them are understood. Consultation, possibly with a small "c" but sometimes with a large "C" is a regular part of our anti-doping strategy now. I hope that has given an indication of where we are coming from.