Mr. Denis Sheridan:

The EU directive is from 1994 and it was transposed in 1996. SIPTU raised this issue with politicians and so on a number of times. The Government at that time went to great lengths to attract multinational companies to Ireland for the purpose of bringing Ireland out of a recession and emphasised that the legislation did not cover collective bargaining, so it fell on deaf ears. Subsequently, in 1994, it was agreed to review the European directive and it was recast in 2009. Changes were made to definitions of what is meant by the terms "consultations" and "transnational". The recast legislation was transposed into Irish law in 2011 and, again, a timeframe was put in place whereby another review would take place within Europe but for a number of reasons a review was not done within Europe.