Ms Sorcha Tunney:

I will answer that. The relevant Minister of State is new and we have not had a meeting with him yet. We will have a meeting in the coming weeks. We have had a few meetings with officials from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment on this and while they are open and willing and able to engage, this could be ramped up a bit. When we look at what is happening at the Council, we see that many countries are really engaging in this process. They are doing so by publishing their positions on the proposal. We do not really have a sense of how Ireland feels about various aspects of it. The proposal is being negotiated and it is very worrying to see that Ireland is still saying it is a very early stage in the process. As Ms de Barra has said, the Czech Presidency has upped the timelines and is pushing on this. We are on the third compromise text and we have not heard any comments from Ireland on those texts. We have not seen what the position is and while that is not for us to see, we do not have a sense of where Ireland stands. Even last week, the Spanish Government released draft legislation. The Dutch Government did that six months ago and other countries have legislated. We have ambition as a human rights leader. This directive takes human rights into a different area - business - and we need to have more ambition in this area to bring our human rights knowledge to the international side.