Mr. Brendan Gleeson:

It is important that this is now provided for in primary legislation. It is a body in its own right. The members are appointed by the committee. We have provided for a significant increase in the number of people on the control committee. I will come back to that in a while. It is so they can move along more quickly than they do at present. We have also provided by statute that they should be provided with whatever resources they need to conduct a case. We have provided a mechanism that is included in the Horse Racing Ireland Bill, to the effect that if there is any dispute between the committee and Greyhound Racing Ireland as to those resources, they can get an arbitrator in to make a determination which would be binding on both parties.

In practice, these are not issues for the committee but we wanted it sewn into the legislation here to make it clear that this is a body which is independent of Greyhound Racing Ireland and can ask Greyhound Racing Ireland for any resources that it needs and would have some mechanism for ensuring that it gets those resources if there is any dispute about them. That all comes later in the Bill.

Head 19 concerns disqualification orders. These relate to specified greyhounds, "kept, owned, trained or managed by a specified person". These are dogs disqualified from entry in any greyhound race, transfer of ownership - that is a new thing and we will come to it in a minute - acceptance for sale at any public sale, or use in breeding. A disqualification order is a racing sanction. As I understand it, it was at least technically possible through a kind of loophole in the current regime to transfer the ownership of a dog.

A disqualification order is served on an individual. As I understand it, one very imaginative solution to that is that the individual could transfer the ownership of the dog to another individual and that, therefore, the disqualification order would not technically apply. That is why we are adding this provision. There may be more ingenious solutions to this but, in any event, we are trying to close off that particular loophole by preventing people from transferring ownership if a disqualification order is served.

The next topic is the exclusion orders under head 20. Exclusion orders relate to persons and are issued by the controls committee, not the board. That is part of the general dispensation here. We are moving things from the board to the control committee, including the application of sanctions. The proposed subsections (4) and (5) provide that anybody who receives an exclusion order from the board is also prohibited from attending a coursing meeting. Anybody who receives an exclusion order from the ICC is prohibited from attending a greyhound racing track or from being at a public sale of greyhounds. We were faced with the potential situation of somebody who is involved in the greyhound sector getting a sanction from one of the bodies regulating the sector, for example, the racing body. That person could still go off and participate in coursing if he or she wished. What we are now saying is that if a sanction of an exclusion order is applied by one of these bodies, it also applies to the other body's events. That will be difficult to implement. There is no doubt about that. However, I think it is an important principle and it is established in this provision.