Dr. Lynn Hillyer:

I am very happy to do so. I thank Mr. Egan. The inference was in response to questions from Senator Mullen that there has been a dramatic increase in testing and inspections in the past couple of months. I want to put that in some sort of perspective. I mentioned last week that our out-of-competition testing has improved or increased from approximately 9% in 2016 to 18% in 2019 and is now up at 28%. That did not happen in the last two months. We did not wake up two months ago and begin testing. It has been a gradual, incremental and quite dramatic increase over the last two, three and four years.

The reason we have increased our out-of-competition testing is because that is where we need to focus our efforts. Any modern anti-doping programme does that. There has been an increase in June; there is no doubt about that. That was entirely coincidental with the issue of our authorised officer warrant cards. We had a little bit of ground to make up due to Covid-related absences on yards earlier in the year. I think I explained that last year and the Deputy can see from our statistics. It has, therefore, increased. We will be increasing it. Again, as I explained last week, it is not all about numbers. It is about the quality of the testing as well as the numbers.