Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 7 December 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

EU Legislative Proposal on Corporate Sustainability and Due Diligence: Discussion

Ms Caroline Spillane:

The only thing we did ask about within the research was in the context where we broke things down by sector regarding who oversees the ESG-related matters of the primary organisation and how often they reported on ESG goals and progress. We did see that a healthy proportion of the financial services sector was overseeing, at full board level, ESG-related matters in their primary organisations. Just under half of them were reporting progress annually. This compares reasonably favourably to the other sectors we looked at, which were energy and resources, information technology and healthcare and life sciences. It is still, however, less than 50% and so it is good to have these snapshots in time. I would be careful about extrapolating from them because the sample size was low for some of these sectors, but we do wish to see this improving over time.