Professor Michael Breen:

With regard to the data, the period under study was the five years from 2014 to 2019. It is a very limited study in that most of it came from the conversation with the NGOs. Almost by definition, we did not have direct contact with trafficking victims. What we have is very strong evidence of why trafficking victims would not come forward. Trying to get them to come forward to give information was almost impossible. The reality is that if we were to work with all of the NGOs and with the HSE on some of its data, we would have uncovered significantly more victims, that is, people who were not identified at the time because they were never tested against the criteria of the Palermo Protocol.