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)

Dr. Lynn Hillyer:

I would say there are a lot more horses. Let me rephrase that. Fewer horses will be resampled more than once. The hair is a very good example. If we see that a horse has had a hair sample taken, and it is very obvious when it has a hair sample taken, our policy is not to resample that horse within a month unless there is very good reason to do so. Obviously, more hair would be taken than would be needed and it gives a very long window of coverage. If a horse is repeatedly winning, let us say it is having a winning streak, and it is winning once, twice or three times in succession, then it would be sampled sequentially. That would be the right thing to do because we need to protect that winning status. It would depend. We can do that analysis, but it is not presented here.