Unified Patent Court
Dail Éireann — 2023-05-11
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Simon Coveney (FG), Cork South-Central

The preparation is quite advanced. Of course, we have to rely on the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage regarding the work on the electoral commission that is required for the referendum, but that can be done. I am confident that if we choose to do this in the autumn, it will be possible to do it in the autumn, but I think we need to make a wise political decision as to when we are most likely to get it passed and when we will have an electorate that wants to hear and understand the detail of what we are asking of them. What I am saying is that we may hold this in the autumn - that has not been finally decided by the Government yet - but I think the more likely date is to hold it this time next year at the same time as the local and European elections.
By the way, I can see the Deputy is impatient to get this done. As to the setting up of this court, whether we get this referendum passed in the late autumn or in the spring of next year does not make a huge difference. As long as we get it passed, we can then move quickly with the legislation on the setting up of the court. Either way, it is going to take some time to get that done.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2023-05-11/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:53+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-05-11