Irish Examiner view: Concerns over governance in horseracing
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While the entire country is learning about the intricacies of corporate compliance as RTÉ executives troop in to face Oireachtas committees, another organisation had a landmark day in Kildare St yesterday.
The revelations about RTÉ’s internal processes on Wednesday set a high bar in terms of grabbing headlines, but the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) made a valiant attempt to outdo the national broadcaster yesterday.
IHRB chief executive Darragh O’Loughlin departed from his prepared opening statement to the public accounts committee (PAC) yesterday morning to say that “within the last 48 hours” he had become aware of a “hitherto unknown issue” which “caused grave concern”.
Mr O’Loughlin did not go into detail about this issue but informed the meeting that the organisation’s chief financial officer, Donal O’Shea, was not present for the meeting because he had taken “a period of voluntary leave without prejudice to his position”, beginning on Wednesday.
The PAC was also told how Mr O’Loughlin replaced former CEO Denis Egan, who recently took an early retirement package of €384,870, which was far beyond the terms of a severance scheme.
The IHRB is funded almost entirely by Horse Racing Ireland through a fund administered by the Department of Agriculture, meaning that once again the taxpayer is footing the bill.
This hardly comes as a surprise — the horseracing industry as a whole has been supported by the State through various incentives and programmes for many years.
Revelations such as this will surely lead to calls for this support to be re-examined at the very least. The IHRB could hardly have picked a worse time to give rise to concerns about its corporate governance, given the way RTÉ has heightened public consciousness of this once-obscure area. Horseracing aficionados will be well aware of how damaging it can be to get one’s timing wrong.