Mr. Darragh O'Loughlin:

As Senator Daly pointed out, the then-chief financial officer of IHRB is no longer in place. It is a matter of public record that he was on leave. He was placed on leave at the end of June 2023 when we became aware of what had happened more than one year earlier at the beginning of 2022. He resigned earlier this year. That again is a matter of public record. The man resigned from the IHRB at the beginning of July. I will not say any more about him other than that the Senator is correct; he was on a period of leave. The Senator is also correct that he resigned.

Since this happened in the IHRB, we have a new CEO, chief financial officer and new independent directors on our board of directors. We have a different chairman and a new strategy which has been published and is providing the direction in which we are travelling. We are professionalising what we do. We are aiming for a measure of consistency in how we enforce the rules of racing and sanction people who are in breach of the rules or racing. We are using the time and the expertise of judges and retired judges from the High Court to make the important decisions in our referrals and appeals. We are an utterly transformed organisation and are still not finished. We collaborate much more closely with Horse Racing Ireland, HRI, than was the case previously. As I detailed already, we have quarterly meetings which are quite formal in nature in which we go through and expose all of our finances, management accounts and our spending. We also have ongoing informal communications. As I said in the opening statement, we work with HRI on shared objectives such as a shared IT strategy and a shared services approach to human resource management and procurement. It provides us with resources and assistance and, in turn, we provide it with full transparency in all of these areas of governance which are so important. HRI has governance oversight of the IHRB and there is nothing we are not being transparent about with it at the moment.

Rather than looking backward and deciding who should suffer and what they should suffer in terms of sanctions, we are very much looking forward. We have put controls in place, which I outlined earlier, to ensure that nothing of this nature can happen again. We have not for a moment said that what happened and what is described so accurately and in such detail in this Forvis Mazars report was acceptable or that any of it should have happened. We have held our hands up as an organisation and have outlined all of the steps we are taking under new management, with new independent directors on our board, to address this and to make sure that from this point forward, we do things as they should be done.