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:

We are on a par with our nearest neighbours without a doubt. We have a similar sampling pressure, sampling density, when compared with our nearest neighbours across the water. Compared with other jurisdictions, such as possibly France Galop and some of the Australian jurisdictions, we do not do as much and increasing our on-course testing was in Dr. Suann's report. I welcome that. We had some of these plans in mind. We set out in 2019 in our strategic plan that we wanted to increase certain types of testing. Pre-race testing is the one that has received a lot of coverage but also on-arrival testing and less predictable testing on-track. Where we want to get to now is to work on that. To be honest, I have been focused on the out-of-competition testing for the past two to three years. We had to get our percentage of out-of-competition testing up from where it was and we have done that now. We certainly are not going to rest on our laurels but we now need to increase our on-track testing.

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