Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-15
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Duncan Smith (LAB), Dublin Fingal East

We did not have much time to debate this even on Committee Stage. The Minister of State accused us of putting forward hypotheticals to scaremonger even though we are basing them on a number of cases that have taken place internationally. He has constantly told us that X, Y and Z have to happen, ultimately this is really rare and probably will not happen anyway so what is the big worry but this is going to happen. The ICS will come in under this and we will be vulnerable. It is a risk we do not have to take because we have a modern, trusted Judiciary that is well capable of determining cases if a company feels the State has acted with a degree of malevolence to impact its ability to make profits. There is a system for a grievance to be taken against the State, should a company want to do so. That is the system in which we believe. We do not believe in an investor court system. We are not scaremongering; we are basing it on evidence of a system that is rooted in a mid-20th century system where the rich global north was exploiting the poor global south and did not trust their judiciary systems so they set up the ISDS system, which ultimately became the ICS. The corporates have codified and formalised that and have put enough pressure on the EU, Canada and everyone else to ensure that this system must be included in trade deals. It is a system that is fundamentally wrong especially when we have modern, trusted, transparent judiciaries like we have in this country. That is where we are coming from.

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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