Mr. Peter Bunting:

A significant Irish company is involved in land clearance. Not to name a company, but the ESB purchases a lot of Colombian coal and brings it in through Foynes. We could start to do something in this regard. It has agreements and contracts and brings it in from Buenaventura. We might have leverage in this regard.

Deputy Crowe asked whether we should suspend the free trade agreement. I would hope so but I do not think we will ever get that far. When it is held up on the premise of seeing real human rights progress and real democracy in action, we have some leverage. Once the agreement is in operation it will be of no use to us. I take Deputy Crowe's view on this. He is also correct that only 1% of the land has been returned. With regard to the peace process, Mr. Conor Murphy and I were there with parliamentarians from Westminster and they are all playing a positive role in this regard.

Senator Mullins asked how we can influence treaties. This year at its conference the International Labour Organization, ILO, put Colombia on its top 15 hit list for specific mentoring and monitoring of non-implementation of ILO agreements. This will come down the line in Colombia this year. I assume we all agree there should not only be independent assessment of the agreements but also, as Senator Walsh stated, an independent commission on who killed whom. We know that everybody in Northern Ireland is crying out for closure on who did what to whom. We know how this has infected the peace process to a certain extent. It is an ongoing issue which will infect it until we deal with it in some form. They are supposed to be talking about it at present in Stormont, but I do not hold out much hope for an agreement.

It is easy to say there is a reaction to FARC, but there are no guerrillas in Buenaventura and the bishop informed us it is largely populated by right-wing paramilitaries. This is all that is there. There are no guerrilla movements there so it is not all about reactions.

The health and safety of workers is a huge issue. We would like to test the trade-off between human rights against trade in this context. This is up to Europe. From a trade union point of view, a difficulty we have is that Europe has moved away from the social dimension to purely an economic dimension and this has posed difficulties for everybody in Europe with regard to this agreement.