Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 June 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine

Horse Racing in Ireland and the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board's Anti-doping Programme: Discussion

Dr. Lynn Hillyer:

No, absolutely not. I will answer the third part first. When we attend a premises, as I said earlier, we try to behave as respectfully as we possibly can. Processes, training and all sorts of things could be going on in that yard at the time we go in. We will literally ring on the doorbell, unless there is a very good reason not to, which I already went into earlier. We will explain our presence. Normally, we would telephone the trainer or the person responsible first off. We will enter and introduce ourselves and present warrant cards, go through why we are there and explain very clearly what it is we need to do. I can honestly say that I have not had any resistance on any of the inspections that I have been on. I have had nothing but collaboration and co-operation from licensees and from non-licensees. Given that this was totally new for non-licensees last year we did try to work with the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders Association, ITBA to put out a question-and-answer session as to what to expect and we have tried to be very transparent about what we do. Even so, it was new. I have actually been very impressed and pleasantly surprised by how the vast majority of people are actually the opposite and say "We are very pleased to see you", or words to that effect. I am sure there are some who would rather we were not there but they certainly never say that or obstruct us, or cause any issue that has caused us to have to escalate matters.

As I said earlier the manual itself was intended and written as a training aid. It is an internal document. There are sections in there that are sensitive in terms of regulatory information. There are no secrets in there, however. We have had discussions with others in the Department about how we can share this information without compromising the operations that we do. I would like to find a way of doing that, even if we can just share the headlines of some of the sections in order that people can see what is in there, but perhaps some of the detail might need to come out. At the end of the day, we are all trying to achieve the same thing, which is to underline competence in these systems, while being transparent. I need to do that and I want to do that but we cannot undermine the systems themselves. At the end of the day this is-----

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