Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2025-12-09 ============================================================ Barry Ward (FG), Dún Laoghaire Let me explain to Deputy Murphy what the law is in case there is any doubt about it. Yes, the High Court interprets Irish law but CETA will essentially become the law for these disputes between companies and states or between states. We are signing up to that law. We know what that law says. It will be applied in exactly the same way that a High Court judge would interpret any law. By the way, High Court judges do not just deal with Irish law. The High Court deals with contractual disputes all the time in which it parses agreements between individuals and companies. So, the law is more than just the statutes that are passed by this House or the orders signed by Ministers. The law is a complex nebulous thing that is made up of all kinds of documents from all kinds of different sources. In this instance, the law would not just be the CETA agreement, but the agreement between the individual companies or what they have agreed with particular entities. That would be the law that would be assessed by an investor court. So, let us put aside this bogey-man nonsense, which has been going on for some time now. There are a couple of things we should actually be looking at in the context of passing this legislation. We know it is there to allow us to ratify the CETA agreement. Is the CETA agreement good for Ireland and good for Irish people? It absolutely is. I will come back to the comments I made about this being a small, open economy that relies on positive trade with other countries around the world. It is good for the Irish economy and the people living within the Irish economy. Looking at the CETA agreement and the provisions within it, which include these investor courts or this arbitration system, are they something we should be afraid of? Why should we be afraid? The only rhetoric I have heard in this debate as to why we should be afraid is that it is not Irish courts making the decision, but an arbitration body, albeit one made up of independent people and experts in their field and people who have no skin in the game. That is where decisions will be made instead of in Irish courts. One would not be any more confident of a result going the way one wants it to go in an Irish court than one would in the investor court, though. In fact, the greatest confidence one can have in terms of how a decision might go is whether it is in accordance with the rules or the basis on which that decision was made. In the instance of a dispute between, say, a Canadian company and an Irish Government, that is based on the agreement between them and the provisions laid down in the CETA agreement, but there is nothing in here that we should be afraid of. I have spoken to a lot of trade law experts about this and a lot of people on both sides of this debate and they are not afraid of the things - the bogey-men - that my friends on the opposite side are putting out there, so let us be reasonable about this. We cannot say there is anything in this that is actually going to destroy trade or force the Government into particular policy positions. Of course, Governments cannot behave capriciously, but that is already the case under Irish law and European law, so there is no change there. However, it is very clear that the CETA agreement does not provide in the relevant articles a right for companies to expect certain profits. Reference was made to changes in relation to, as Deputy Murphy said, a left Government prioritising non-fossil fuels, as if no other Government could possibly do that despite the fact that this Government has been fighting to reduce emissions in this country for I do not know how long. Let us say for argument's sake that a future Government tries to put in place a policy that is going to be detrimental to petrochemical companies. There is nothing in the CETA agreement that would allow such a petrochemical company, be it Canadian or a US-owned Canadian subsidiary, to go to an investor court and say it thought it would be pulling in the big bucks for the next ten or 20 years. --- 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/2025-12-09/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:26+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-12-09