Ms Mary Lawlor:

I absolutely agree that it will be difficult but all human rights work is difficult because it is never accepted by governments or companies that they should protect the most marginalised in society. That is a starting point. I absolutely agree with the Deputy about corporate reputation. From the work I have done with companies over the past two years - and I have written to many companies that have been engaged in abuses against communities and, in particular, human rights defenders because that is my mandate - it is clear to me that the only thing they care about is their reputations because that affects their share prices. It is the same with governments. Governments will go to any extent to stop you doing a negative press release about something they are doing. It is just the way of the world. Every government wants to protect its reputation and its political and strategic interests. From that point of view, I completely agree with Deputy Shanahan.

Getting back to something that occurred to me in response to, I think, Deputy Flaherty, when we in the school of business in Trinity College do the benchmarking of the 50 biggest companies in Ireland on only their published information, and half of them score under 20%, we find that a lot of it is that they just do not know. They need to be educated; not all of them. Obviously, very few of them are engaged in human rights violations of one kind or another, either directly or indirectly, but the point is that education is needed. If we look at what is coming, apart from what I have said about the Escazú Agreement and the Aarhus Convention, we find that the Inter-American Development Bank has included a section on reprisals. The International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group, also has a section on retaliation and threats. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has also issued a statement on retaliation. Then there are the companies. Deputy Stanton mentioned the 100 companies. There are a lot of big companies and a lot of small companies engaged in this issue. Big ones like Unilever, for example, are very engaged.

What I am saying is that I absolutely agree with the Deputy but we have to take this step. Nothing will happen until we start taking the right steps in the right direction, using all the tools at our disposal, including social media.