Ms Denise Roche:

If you start at the 250, from reading the Bill, it is two years from the commencement of the Act. We are talking about perhaps three years before we see any figures at all. The experience from the UK was that companies waited until the very last minute to publish, so the earliest we will see anything, if we go with this timeline, is three years.

If we look at the experience of other countries, Australia started with 100, Austria started with 150. The UK started at 250 but they have 67 million people living in their country. We think a much lower figure is much more reasonable and would be much more immediate. Then again, there have been questions raised about data protection, but Lithuania is in the EU and has managed to start at 20 and is meeting the same requirements as are we.

It is important that the idea of the action plan is not lost. It is not enough to provide information as to why the numbers are the way they are. We want to see companies saying how they will fix things and what they are going to do in the intervening years between publication of their figures.