Ms Sorcha Tunney:

The current draft is to pull the directive back to the initial draft. At the moment, it includes the whole value chain. It gives a clarifying established business relationship for businesses, and we want to examine that term and what it means. This comes from the French law. As Ms de Barra mentioned, many of the human rights and environmental abuses happen very far down the chain. To make this directive impactful and effective on the ground it needs to cover the value chain. We are hopeful that Ireland will be keen to do that.

We are talking about how businesses communicate and how they put up their suppliers. With Rana Plaza, it was not known who was buying the products until the fire scene was visited and the collars and what they were sown on to were inspected. Businesses were not willing to put their names forward to that disaster. It was the same with KiK fire in Pakistan. We need to make sure we are mapping the full value chain and that this includes informal settings where most of us recognise that women will be working. That includes home-based work. As Ms Lawlor said, human rights defenders and unions are the first port of call when mapping that supply chain. This is why we need them included in this directive and that they be consulted at every point of due diligence.