Red Mills Boss Hits Out At Turf Club

Red Mills Horse Feed boss Joe Connolly has hit out at the Turf Club's inefficiency at dealing with the outstanding morphine cases.

Eight of the nine cases from last November and December are outstanding and awaiting an official inquiry. The Turf Club announced last month that these hearings could be delayed for months because of the detailed information requested by lawyers acting for the trainers involved.

Connolly has sent a letter to a number of trainers saying: 'We are frustrated that this process has dragged on for so long. We have undertaken to provide expert technical and veterinary inputs on behalf of the trainers involved.

'The experts have requested some basic information that includes the BHP Laboratories' test analysis, any in-house rules, procedures, tolerance, reporting or threshold levels used, standard operating procedures, who is responsible etc.

'To our surprise the Turf Club has declared publicly that it will take them up to three months to gather this information.'

Connolly has also repeated his earlier calls for a threshold level to be introduced for morphine, and added: 'Both the Turf Club and the Jockey Club are continuing to attempt to disqualify all horses with confirmed positive samples.'

The Jockey Club has so far dealt with only four of the 37 morphine positives in Britain. The outstanding cases include the Willie Mullins-trained Hennessy Gold Cup winner Be My Royal.

Turf Club chief executive Denis Egan on Tuesday refuted Connolly's criticisms. He said: 'We are as anxious as he is to conclude these appeals but our laboratory, while doing its best to provide the information requested, has other work to do in analysing samples and it can't just leave that.

'The Jockey Club has not advanced many of their cases for much the same reason and we will not go to hearing until we have all the information.'