Niamh Smyth

Good morning, Joe.

Thanks for having me on your show.

Yes, Joel, you quite rightly said there in your introduction that up until now, the CRO, when companies do their returns to the CRO, there's many facts and figures made available, but part of that is directors and secretaries, their residential address.

And that has been the case for many decades.

I suppose the idea with the consultation is

that the CLRG, which is also known as the Companies Law Review Group, have been tasked, they advise me and other ministers within the department about changes that we need to make with legislation.

And part of the recommendation that they have made is

this suggestion that the residential address of directors and secretaries would be removed from public view and that they would now have the option to put in a contact address as an alternative.

But it is important to say that while the usual residential address would be removed from public view, it would remain very much so.

That information would still be

um submitted to the cro that those details would be available and i know your sort of angle and concern around this is around fraud or that directors might be a little bit more off the hook by not having to provide those details but just to reassure you that those details would still have to be provided to the cro what is the risk of keeping the status quo what's the risk with you know keeping everything as it currently is

Yeah, well, at the moment, I suppose what we're trying to do and we're seeking to do and having this open to public consultation at the moment is to get the right balance, I suppose, between access to information and individual privacy considerations.

We do live in a very different world, Jo, and I know you're in public life, I'm in public life.

And really and truly, directors and secretaries, you know, it is part of it all where up until this point, public life has become a little bit more tricky in terms of personal safety for people.

And that is where this has really come from.

The Company Law Review Group is the

personal safety of directors and secretaries, if you're given the details of their residential home, effectively their home, their family are exposed in a very public way.

So it doesn't seek to, I suppose, hide away from the responsibility that comes with being a secretary or a director of a company.

It actually seeks to give, to strike the balance, as I said,

between having access to the really important information as how they can be contactable, because we know things happen.