Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

496. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the reason it has taken five years to get a new laboratory when the Irish Greyhound Board was made aware in 2012 that the laboratory did not test for oil-based stanazol. [15345/17]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

This is an operational matter for Bord na gCon .

However, I understand from Bord na gCon  that the core issue with stanazol is that the detection limit obtained using older equipment was not as low as that obtained using newer generation equipment.  It did not mean that Bord na gCon couldn’t test for this drug but that it was an issue of sensitivity. 

In 2014 testing was outsourced to a UK laboratory but ultimately this cost proved prohibitive.

Following a cost and regulatory review, a tender process was undertaken which resulted in the purchase of a new state of the art analytical system that allows for the detection of substances, including anabolic steroids, at very low levels in samples taken from greyhounds.

The new top of the range equipment belongs to the triple-quadrupole liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) class of systems. It is very sensitive allowing for the detection of drugs such as anabolic steroids which may have been administered a considerable time before the greyhound was sampled and thus have very low levels of residues remaining in the sample. It will, for example, greatly improve the laboratory’s ability to detect metabolites of the anabolic steroid stanazol in samples from greyhounds.