Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 14 June 2022
1973. Deputy Paul Murphy asked the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine further to Parliamentary Question No. 906 of 29 March 2022, the reason that the figures provided in his response do not correlate with the figures previously supplied [29484/22]
Amharc ar fhreagraThe Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) (formerly the Turf Club) is the regulatory body for horse racing in Ireland. The role of the body as the regulator of horse racing was set out in legislation under the Irish Horse Racing Industry Act 1994 however the body itself remains a private entity. The role of the IHRB is provided for under the Irish Horse Racing Act 2016 and subsequent Statutory Instruments.The IHRB has informed this Department that following the recommendation of an industry wide task force in 2016, an Equine Anti-Doping Department was set up by the then Turf Club that year. One of the first tasks for the new Department was to run a public procurement for the laboratory services for the regulator and LGC was the successful candidate with the contract coming into effect in 2018. Prior to this, the statistics published for samples taken from horses were compiled for the billing period of the laboratory. From 2018, new systems were adopted which allowed for in-house administration to track the figures in a more efficient basis and give the figures from a calendar year rather than a billing year. The discrepancies referred to in the material provided by the Deputy to my Department are due to an overlap in the billing period where samples taken in December would not be accounted for until the following year, whereas since LGC have become the contracted laboratory, the figures given were for the calendar year.
