Third Time Lucky?
Michael Watts MRCVS
Brexit, the Prime Minister insists, means Brexit. But what does it really mean? Nobody seems to know for sure, least of all those who voted for it. It seems like a lot of folk voted to leave the E.U. on 23rd June not so much because they really wanted to leave but because they were tired of the elite dictating to them and wanted to register a protest. They were as surprised by their success as everyone else. So where do we go from here? Maybe what we need to do is to encourage a public debate to thrash out the key issues, then have another referendum and see how many people have changed their minds. Look at the Scots, for example. They voted pretty overwhelmingly to remain within the E.U. but as things stand they will have to leave along with the rest of the U.K. whether they like it or not. Unless that is they have another referendum on independence and use the opportunity to remain within the E.U. while baling out of the U.K. In Ireland they have a bit of a track record at this sort of thing. For example they voted to reject the Nice Treaty back in 2001 only to have the suits in the Dáil send them back to the polling booth for another go a year later. This time around they had a change of heart and the majority voted to accept the Treaty and lived happily ever after. Until that is they were asked to vote on the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, when they defied the promptings of their political leaders and rejected the proposition. Once the full significance of the issues surrounding the Treaty had been adequately explained to them however they agreed to have another crack at it. In yet another referendum held in 2009 the original decision was reversed and the country being the good Europeans they traditionally have been, agreed to sign up to the Treaty. If at first you don’t succeed, vote, vote, vote again until you get the answer the elite wanted in the first place. That is democracy for you, after a fashion at least. What if the same guiding principle applied to poker schools, and you could just keep dealing, discarding and re-dealing the cards until you were confident you had the winning hand and could lift the pot?
The Irish Greyhound Board, or Bord na gCon as old farts like me still tend to call it, launched the second phase of its Public Consultation for Regulatory Reform back last August. “Through public consultation the ability of a Regulatory Authority to actively seek the opinions of interested and affected groups is a key regulatory tool which has already lead to improved transparency, efficiency and effectiveness of the regulatory infrastructure of Bord na gCon following on from the publication of the 2014 Indecon Report on the Irish Greyhound industry” they claim. We heard what they said, but do kind of get what they are trying to say, sort of, up to a point. When push comes to shove any kind of public consultation cannot be all bad. It is good to see the movers and shakers taking soundings from the stakeholders without whom there would be no greyhound game. With luck they might listen to them eventually, if not actually the first time. You might have thought they would have learned by their mistakes down the years, but that is open to debate. Walk with me a while down memory lane if you will and maybe you will see what I mean. Here goes nothing.
Back in February 2006 the dismissal of the then C.E.O. of the Irish Greyhound Board Aidan Tynan, coupled with some curious decisions made by the Control Committee of the Board in their handling of two cases where greyhounds had tested positive for prohibited substances, prompted the Minister of Agriculture, who has ultimate responsibility for the greyhound industry in the Republic of Ireland, to set up an independent inquiry in “Certain Matters Affecting Bord na gCon”. The lucky guy who was handed this particular poisoned chalice was retired civil servant Tim Dalton, sometime General Secretary in the Department of Justice. In the line of duty I have read over the years what feels like more than my fair share of reports into this or that aspect of the greyhound game commissioned by one body or another. Re-reading Mr Dalton’s contribution to the genre I am struck how brief and to the point it is and what easy reading it makes. If only there were more like it! He starts his discussion of the doping of greyhounds by reminding us what a prohibited substance is. Under the provisions of the Greyhound Race Track (Racing) Regulations 1993, a prohibited substance in this context is “any substance which, by its nature, could affect the performance of a greyhound, the origin of which on or in the tissues, body fluids or excreta of a greyhound could not be traced to normal and ordinary feeding or care” which pretty much says it all. There are two significant results of this particular definition. The first is that the motives for giving a greyhound a prohibited substance are irrelevant. It makes no odds whether a dog has been given something by its owner or trainer to enhance or retard its performance, or has been treated by a veterinary surgeon for illness or injury, or has been unwittingly offered foodstuffs contaminated with residues of a prohibited substance. A positive test is a positive test, although the circumstances of each case may be taken into account when deciding on the most appropriate penalty. The second is that there is at very least an onus on the owner and trainer of a greyhound entered in a race to make a reasonable effort to ensure that their dog competes free from prohibited substances. No shit Sherlock. That is not exactly rocket science, you might think. However at the time of Mr.Dalton’s investigations, there were significant differences between the letter of the law and the implementation of the law in practice. He highlighted the anomalous position of anabolic steroids, for example. While some anabolic steroids, such as testosterone for example, are naturally occurring in some situations, others such as nandrolone are not and where residues of them are detected in a greyhound they are unlikely to have arisen as a result of normal and ordinary feeding or care. Strange to say however back in 2006 they appear not to have been regarded as prohibited substances in Ireland although I suspect that the NG.R.C of that era would hardly have been as understanding should a dog have tested positive for them at one of their tracks.
A few weeks short of a decade later, Bord na gCon commissioned Professor Tim Morris, independent scientific adviser to the G.B.G.B., to carry out further investigations into anti-doping and medication control in Ireland. His findings were revealed to a meeting of greyhound industry stakeholders on July 14th this year. At this press conference I.G.B. Chairman Phil Meaney reminded his audience that the Bord had introduced what was described as a comprehensive suite of new statutory instruments and regulations designed to strengthen compliance within the industry. One of these turned out to be a new regulation to enable the “investigation and prosecution of cases involving anabolic steroids”. Good move guys, but what kept you? After all Tim Dalton had highlighted the problems surrounding anabolic steroid use in greyhounds ten years previously. Did it really take a second inquiry, with all the expense that involved, to convince the I.G.B. that changes had to be made when the use of anabolic steroids in racing greyhounds had been outlawed in the U.K. and Down Under way back when?
Another issue that particularly exercised the talents of Mr.Dalton back in the day was that of the publication of details of positive test results. At the time of his inquiry the Control Committee which adjudicates in the case of positive tests for prohibited substances had, by law, discretion as to whether or not to publish such details of positive tests as the name of the owner or trainer involved, the name of the greyhound, the location of the race or sweepstake in question and so forth. The accepted practice in that era seems to have been that offences involving performance enhancers and inhibitors, those involving second or subsequent caffeine offences and those involving repeated offences for all prohibited substances were normally published. The cases which led to Mr.Dalton being called in were two involving the alleged administration to racing greyhounds of the drug EPO. Used in human medicine to boost red blood cell counts in patients whose bone marrow has been damaged by chronic kidney disease or chemotherapy for cancer, EPO has been notoriously used by athletes to enhance their performance, especially in endurance sports such as cycling. Genuine clinical justifications for its use in racing greyhounds are frankly hard to find and as a potentially performance-enhancing drug its presence in a sample collected trackside from a race dog would normally have been published. In the two cases detailed in the Dalton Report, however the Control Committee was divided over whether or not to publish. The Chairman reportedly suggested that the findings in the case should not be published. Another member of the Committee allegedly suggested that it was possible that owners and trainers had not been given sufficient warning that the IGB lab had the capability to identify EPO in urine samples. What colour is the sky in his planet? To my admittedly untrained eye EPO fairly clearly came within the legal definition of a prohibited substance given in the Greyhound Race Track (Racing) Regulations 1993. Maybe I am missing something here. Was our friend, who had better remain nameless in the circumstances, seriously suggesting that owners and trainers should only refrain from using those prohibited substances that the Bord’s laboratory could detect and that they could work away with the undetectable stuff to their hearts’ content? That is not a very politically correct stance, to put it mildly. The then C.E.O. Aidan Tynan, who sat on the Control Committee ex officio, certainly seems to have had problems with it. Mr.Dalton reports him as having said that “not publishing cases of this nature involving serious prohibited substances could leave the Control Committee and the Board exposed. He thought it better in the long run to adhere to the publication policy regarding the use of serious substances”. He may have hit the nail squarely on the head but he failed to sway his colleagues. The Control Committee decided that there should be no publication of this finding and contented themselves with publishing a notice in the trade press that in the future owners of greyhounds testing positive for EPO would be fined a minimum of €1,000 plus the costs of the testing, which were estimated at around €2,000. For comparative purposes, at this time the owners of dogs testing positive for a therapeutic substance were normally fined €50 and those of dogs testing positive for Caffeine €100 while the maximum fine for a positive Amphetamine test was reportedly just €500. Who said crime doesn’t pay? You might think that fines at that level are not exactly unduly punitive and that the low-lifes are not going to go hungry or their children barefoot as a result but I for one could not possibly comment.
Indecon International Consultants, the international economic consultancy that had cast an eye over the Irish horse racing industry a couple of years previously, was commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine to carry out a “Review of Certain Matters Relating to Bord na gCon” which they completed in July 2014. They came down heavily on the side of publishing the details of positive tests for prohibited substances. “In Indecon’s view” their Report reads “the numbers of positive tests and numbers of adverse findings published, as well as the number of cases dismissed, are potentially damaging to the reputation and perceptions of the greyhound industry”. There are not too many punches pulled there, but given that ten years had passed since the Dalton Report with few of the issues raised in it having been satisfactorily resolved between times, you might have thought that the time for half measures was long past. Clearly the powers-that-be did not view the issue in quite that light, as the greyhound industry had hardly time to study, absorb and digest the findings of the Indecon Report before Professor Morris began his investigations, some at least of which went back over areas that the Indecon people had already touched on and Tim Dalton before them.
Professor Morris was at some pains to explain that his was a review rather than a public consultation and that it was not a systematic study. While he did not claim to have engaged with every interested party, he hoped to include representative views representative of a broad range of internal, national and international stakeholders. From my reading of his Report, he didn’t miss much, or leave much out. He reviewed coverage of the greyhound industry in the main newspapers, parliamentary comments, social media sites, internet forums and letters from stakeholders. Overall his findings do not make comfortable reading. In general terms he found there was a desire for more information, a lack of understanding of the principles and practice of anti-doping and medication control, a desire for improved testing for banned substances and a high degree of mistrust in the IGB, its Board and processes. Prof. Morris reported that “there was also widespread misunderstanding of sampling collection techniques, laboratory, regulatory and Control Committee procedures that all contributed to a lack of trust in these activities and even allegations that adverse analytical findings were being altered”. He concluded that “more publicity and information on all proven and not proven Findings and Reasons for cases from the Control Committee, together with robust practices, could help to reduce this mistrust”.
With three separate inquiries in the last decade. the Irish greyhound industry has been well investigated, dissected, discussed and reported upon. All three inquiries identified problems with a lack of transparency on the part of the IGB which contributed to a widespread lack of faith in their ability and maybe also their willingness to address the problems of medication control and the doping greyhounds. How many more times does Bord na gCon have to be told what the problem is before they take the bull by the horns and start taking steps to do something about it? With the publication of the Morris Report surely it is either third time lucky, or three strikes and you are out.
