Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-15
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Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

Sadly, I too would like to start by expressing my absolute disgust that this debate will be guillotined after just an hour. It railroads any meaningful analysis of the Bill. I am under no impression that most of our amendments are going to go undebated tonight and undiscussed. That a mere hour has been dedicated to discuss what will ultimately be a transformative agreement for this economy and for our future trading partnerships is deeply disturbing. From the beginning, this Government has demonstrated carelessness in the oversight of the ratification of CETA. We have seen that through the constitutional challenges. The lack of pre-legislative scrutiny for this Bill is scandalous. The Dáil select committee and the joint committee have heard no independent expert advice as part of the legislative process for this Bill. The Government continues to rush ahead despite expressions of concern from two Supreme Court justices, one sitting and one former, Mr. Justice Charleton and Mr. Justice Hogan, respectively. Indeed, Mr. Justice Charleton has said that CETA has "...unlimited powers of interpretation of a vague set of principles within the treaty." This is a pretty concerning statement, but this Government does not seem to care and is instead ploughing ahead with a Bill that could have extreme consequences for us all. We should not be surprised, however, because it is an action befitting of this Government. It is trade at any cost, which leads to deregulation and rash decisions made in the pursuit of wealth, with no thought given to the long-term economic health of this country . If these concerns alone do not demonstrate that this agreement requires far more intense Government scrutiny than a discussion tucked away for an hour before home time, I do not know what does.
This amendment, and many of the amendments we are looking at this evening, seek to strengthen the safeguards and the obligations of due diligence on any Minister in the handling of treaty negotiations and trade negotiations. All we are trying to do is bulwark against what I see as handing over our sovereignty willingly to arbitrary investor courts that will haul us over the coals. It will have a chilling effect on this House, on the parliamentary procedures of this country and on our ability to build any sort of just transition or build into our policymaking any social or ethical concerns. I was at a round table today discussing AI and the regulatory gap because I see this same deregulation under the banner of simplification and harmonisation across all Government policy right now.
I heard a European expert describe the EPP, the Minister of State's European grouping, as uncritically pro-business

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-15/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-15