Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Dail Éireann — 2025-12-09 ============================================================ Barry Ward (FG), Dún Laoghaire There is nothing to prevent any Government, be it an Irish Government, a French Government, a Latvian Government or a Cypriot Government, from implementing legitimate policies, which we do as a sovereign country and a sovereign Parliament. There is nothing to suggest we could not do that in light of the CETA agreement. Having listened to many of the speakers in this debate, I really do think that the opposition that has been put up is a string of bogey-men that are not real. They do not actually reflect the reality of what is in this. I say that having looked into this in quite some detail and spoken to people who know a great deal more about trade law than I do. It is not there. --- 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