Greyhound board to announce new chief executive

THE Irish Greyhound Board will announce the successor to former chief executive Aidan Tynan in the next fortnight, The Irish Examiner has learned.

The appointment will come almost a year after Mr Tynan’s dismissal in late January 2005, following a dispute with the then chairman Paschal Taggart.

The post was advertised in mid-February last year and again in September, but Mr Taggart’s successor Dick O’Sullivan denied the post had been offered to one or more candidates and that they had refused. The board’s financial officer has been acting as chief executive since the position became vacant.

“There were about 40 applicants who were whittled down to five or six and we will hopefully make an announcement before January 10,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

It was a traumatic year for the industry’s management, which saw the resignation of Mr Taggart after more than a year at the helm of the industry board. The development came in July, in the same week a report was published by former

Department of Justice secretary general Tim Dalton on the circumstances surrounding Mr Tynan’s sacking almost six months earlier.

It showed that tensions between Mr Taggart and Mr Tynan came to a height when the chief executive brought it to the attention of Sports Minister John O’Donoghue that the board’s control committee had suppressed positive tests for banned substances in two dogs despite board policy to publicise such findings. However, Mr Dalton found that this was not the sole reason for the dismissal.

The board will also announce in the coming days that it will begin testing for anabolic steroids on May 1, meaning their use is effectively banned from early 2007. The decision to ban them was made in June but the board’s regulation staff have been finalising testing facilities since then, with a lead-in time of at least four months required to allow for the slow release of these substances.

The ban will cover use of all anabolic steroids, with exceptions made for certain seasonal suppressants used in bitches, in common with a similar regime in British greyhound racing. Around two dogs are randomly selected for testing at every greyhound race meeting in Ireland, with just over 1% of around 6,000 samples screened by the Irish Greyhound Board last year returning positive for banned substances, in line with international norms.

But while samples will continue to be tested by the board’s lab staff, it is understood that serious consideration is being given to the establishment of an independent control committee.

The committee currently comprises the chairman and a number of other board members, but a group independent of the board was recommended in the Dalton report, as was the steroids ban now being implemented.

Mr O’Sullivan said he hopes that the industry will continue its strong growth as a popular sport with the public during 2007.

“We’ll be hoping for fewer headlines in the news pages and more of them on the sports pages,” he said.