Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 29 November 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Governance Issues: Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (Resumed)
Mr. Darragh O'Loughlin:
The largest one that remains outstanding is the one that calls for an increase in total sampling and testing numbers. As I said to the Chair, we cannot increase those without an additional budget because of the cost of doing that. Some IT expenditure is also required to integrate systems and to give us better data at the point of stable inspections and on the racecourses in order that we can improve further our test distribution plan. We have put that IT work into our budget for next year but our budget has not been approved yet so we cannot go out and commission the work but we are hopeful that piece of capital investment will be approved and we can get the IT work done. We are in discussions with HRI, which is our funder, to see if there is any portion of the necessary uplift in test numbers that we can accommodate within the funds that are available to it to give to us. Does that answer the question?
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