Just a few days before senior officials from Horse Racing Ireland (HRI) and the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) are due to appear before the Irish parliament’s agriculture committee to discuss “integrity and possible drug use” in Irish racing, the Sunday Independent added more fuel to the fire (£) this weekend with fresh claims to back up trainer Jim Bolger’s suggestion last year that drugs are “the number one problem” for the sport in Ireland. One suggestion is that a well-known trainer based in Britain carried out hair testing on six horses bought from Ireland last year. According to the report, the trainer later told Bolger that the results implied three of the six had been given steroids at some stage, and also hinted at the presence of “currently unidentified possible keto steroids”, which had not been seen in any previous analyses of hair samples at the lab conducting the test. The paper also reported unsubstantiated claims by anonymous sources that steroids and cobalt – the drug at the centre of a doping scandal in Australia in 2015 – had been observed in at least two Irish stables, and also that the sources had reported this to the authorities – to no apparent effect. The suggestion that executives may have been filing reports of drug abuse under “too difficult” or “too damaging” seems certain to be one that the agriculture committee will want to pursue at the first of a series of hearings on Thursday. To date, senior figures including Denis Egan, who announced last week that he is to take early retirement from his role as chief executive of the IHRB, have maintained a firm line that there is “a zero-tolerance approach to doping in Irish racing”. In response to the article an IHRB spokesman said: “All information provided to the IHRB is assessed and acted upon.” The IHRB also pointed out in a recent statement – released after Bolger suggested there will “be a Lance Armstrong” in Irish racing – that it will conduct 5,000 dope tests in 2021, including a test on every winner, and that it has the power to “access and sample any thoroughbred at any time in Ireland”. Testing, though, is only 50% of the battle, not least where steroids are concerned because they clear a horse’s system in a few days but leave behind physical improvements that can endure for many weeks or even more. Hair testing is one way to tackle this problem, and the IHRB’s latest report on its dope-testing programme, covering the first six months of the year, shows that 71 hair samples taken on race days and 350 more from out-of-competition testing were all negative for steroids. Ireland has around 9,000 horses in training, so only around 4% of those were sampled, but even so, if steroid use was at anything close to the one-in-two level suggested by the unnamed British trainer - and assuming also that the tests are reliable – you would expect at least 150 positives from 421 tests, and probably more. But 100% negatives from more than 400 tests would be plausible if - as Bolger suggests - the overwhelming majority of Irish trainers are playing by the rules but a handful of “Lance Armstrongs” are gaming the system, and perhaps also using designer drugs that do not show up in testing. For that reason, the second essential weapon in the battle against doping will always be intelligence-led investigation, and this is where the Sunday Independent’s latest claims could be particularly damaging. Specific allegations of corruption – such as those which the paper’s sources claim to have sent to the regulators – need to be treated with the utmost seriousness and investigated accordingly. If it emerges at Thursday’s hearing that the regulator has failed, for whatever reason, to treat information from potential whistleblowers as it should, its credibility will be shot.