Mr. Frank Nyhan:

The industry has been damaged in the public eye over the past two weeks. Anybody who owned a dog or other animal and watched the television programme in question would have been horrified. Most people at this meeting are probably dog owners. I own basset hounds. Anybody whoever owned a dog would have been horrified by what they saw on the programme. Insofar as that relates to the greyhound industry, it is, of course, damaged.

The manifestation of the damage has been seen through the withdrawal of a number of high-profile sponsors, which has been on the news. It is understandable why people would withdraw their sponsorship. Fortunately, that has been confined to several sponsors. A large number of other sponsors stayed on board.

We are talking to sponsors about a changed model of sponsorship. Essentially, we are going to invite sponsors to become involved in the care aspect of the industry. Any sponsorship that we get from sponsors in that regard will go towards the care of greyhounds. The prize fund will be separate from that. Due to the model the industry uses, the withdrawal of sponsorship affects owners and trainers because the sponsorship money goes straight to them. The loss of that money is a loss for them in that regard. We would hope that with today and other meetings we might possibly stem that tide.

We will have a meeting with the British authorities later in July to discuss the question of traceability. The new traceability model will require the co-operation of the Irish Coursing Club and ourselves. I do not anticipate any difficulty in that regard because both bodies are addressing this question. We would hope that we have the manpower and technology to implement the traceability system. What it requires is joined-up thinking rather than any massive investment in terms of people or technology. The current system, whereby some life incidents are reported to one agency while others to another, just does not work. There is an appetite among all the relevant bodies to get this done in a short time. The meeting with the UK authorities is this month. I would expect that, by September, we will be in a position to lay out how this is going to happen. It should be happening in and around then.

The Preferred Results report analysed the figures from 2013, 2014 and 2015 but used the figures for litters from 2009 and extrapolated forward. What happened was that there was a decline in the number of litters between 2009 and 2013. We were in the middle of an economic recession at the time. The basis was incorrect. To be fair, Preferred Results could never have got that correct because there are too many instances where there was no proper recording of greyhounds for anybody to be able to do that exercise properly at the time.