Mr. Fergal Black:

I will pick up on the horse welfare issue. We have approached this as a collaboration, and I would say that we should continue to do so. The horse racing industry has come to us. Recent events have left the industry in the situation where it has not had good publicity and it sees the opportunity of working with us as something that can show it is giving back to society. That is the approach it has taken to me. More importantly, it potentially provides employment opportunities.

My most recent meeting with industry representatives was three weeks ago. They want to appoint an ambassador from within their industry and they have some senior figures in mind who will be the ambassador for this programme. We want to get to a situation where people coming to the end of their sentence, who complete the modules on this programme, can go and maybe start off as stable hands, etc., and get employment and act as role models. We currently have an external agency, which is funded by the horse racing industry, providing the expert training and they have staff there. We want prisoners who graduate through that to become the staff. We wanted to show that it is working.

While we will accept money from anywhere, I am of the view that the money coming from the horse racing industry offers a number of opportunities. It opens doors for us in terms of employment and linkages. We have also put money into it as a State, however. We built a facility that includes the American shed and the arena and we provided the equipment. It is a real collaboration. I believe that having the industry on board to create that opportunity for employment is really positive for us in terms of progression. If we have progression, we will attract prisoners to continue to feed into it because each module only takes eight weeks.