Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for coming to the House. I welcome his work on the Bill. It is great to see the legislation updated. It has been there since 2014. The Bill is very important. Of late, we have lots of experience of whistleblowers, what they can and cannot do, and how their lives are destroyed. Sergeant McCabe, of course, comes to mind, as well as others. I really welcome the Minister of State's work on the Bill. It is very important. We have seen the huge importance that protected disclosures legislation has had in Irish life since it was introduced. We think of all the big cases but it is also important to remember that hundreds of disclosures about issues big and small have been made in the years since the legislation was enacted. The improvements and protections in this amending Bill are hugely welcome and would have made a huge difference to people in the past, including Sergeant McCabe, if we had had them sooner. It is great that the Minister of State is the one who saw the need to do this and has improved it vastly. It was badly needed.

Just last week I met Ms Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur for human rights defenders - I am an ambassador with Front Line Defenders - and she raised a few interesting issues. An element in this Bill might be very good for what she was looking for. One provision of the Bill extends the scope to volunteers, unpaid trainees, board members, shareholders and job applicants, none of whom had any protections before. This is a huge one. Front-line defenders are, in most cases, volunteers and it is very important that we have included them. As a person who has volunteered a lot, I am aware that there are often no protections for volunteers in this regard. It is very important that the Minister of State has included this.

Cases have been documented around the world by Irish companies. In one example, Moneypoint power station changed a supplier as a result of a complaint made about it accessing coal from the Cerrejón mine in Colombia. That mine was absolute carnage when it came to human rights abuses. Thanks to the legislation, the ESB is not getting coal from there now. Unfortunately, it is still getting coal, and we are working on that as well, but at least it is no longer from the most inhumane coal mine in the world. It just shows the importance of this type of legislation.

Thankfully, the EU has been looking at this and has released a draft directive on due diligence, about which I have also been having meetings. It is looking at the supply chain, ethics, and human rights abuses on the supply chain.

Will the Minister of State indicate if there is anything we can do to strengthen provisions in our national legislation with regard to whistleblowing that could help people to draw attention to abuses in the supply chain by Irish companies?It is just something to think about taking further. We import goods from companies that have very questionable human rights and pay standards. I will not mention any in particular - or I might. Fair trade was one thing, but now we also have images of sweatshops, child labour and so on. We have not yet gone far enough in Ireland to look at that and at what we allow in. I know that the Minister of State is doing lots of good work on the circular economy, carbon emissions and much tighter procurement, but we have to look at the ethics around procurement and what we import as well. If we have this really good legislation here in Ireland, we should demand the same of Irish companies working abroad. I will give the House two examples. There is the case of Smurfit Kappa. It has scored zero on Trinity Business School's human rights due diligence indicators. That is worrying because we expect Irish companies to have the highest standards not just in Ireland but everywhere else as all humans are equal, so it is important we look at that.