Ms Siobhán Curran:

On the national plan and plans to raise awareness among businesses, as of yet the plans have not been articulated. Working groups on the national plan are due to be set up but they have not been established yet. I imagine that the second working group, which focuses on businesses, would plan to do that. One of the recommendations in this plan is a human rights due diligence toolkit that would provide guidance for businesses. There is no communications plan around it. A recommendation to the implementation group could be to increase the communication around it, and if it is to facilitate events, then to facilitate training with the Danish institute but I would be wary. There are many toolkits on human rights due diligence and we need to be careful that we are not coming a bit late to the table with too little. Other countries are developing strong legislation and they are way ahead of us. There is a bit of catching up and being part of the trend to be done, which relates to the second question asked by the Senator.

France has led the way with its duty of vigilance law and the Swiss are in the process of developing human rights due diligence law. Ireland is part of the European network. The trend across Europe now is to develop this legislation, and more so in western Europe. Our civil society partners in Belgium are saying that their government is also considering this. They are considering a hybrid of the best parts of the French and Swiss proposals. We are in a great position because there is so much thinking going on about this throughout Europe. We are part of these networks and we can pull from the best legislation. We can learn from the French plan and even improve on it. The trend is going in the direction of more regulation and we should be part of that.