Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-06 ============================================================ Paul Daly (FF), Agricultural Panel I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. I welcome the Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025. The Minister of State has provided a lot of information so I will not rehash it. We are on the same page on this. There is no need for me to go through everything the Minister of State has just said. Since yesterday afternoon, my phone has been hopping. I have put it away now because it is still going on. I received over 700 emails. If I am to believe the content of those emails, the passing or not of this Bill is actually the passing of CETA. That is the information in the emails I have received, which also state that we are setting up a secret corrupt court. What sounded alarm bells for me in this regard was that when I checked the sender address on those emails, I discovered that all 700 came from the same address. That makes me question the bone fides of said emails. The investment court system is made up of 15 individuals - five from the EU, five from Canada and five from third-party countries. That is in the context of the CETA investment protection provisions. Cases are heard by three individuals - one from each group. That could not be any further from the secret corrupt court that I am being warned about. As the Minister of State has said, on the back of the Supreme Court decision, the legislation needs to be amended in order that awards made pursuant to the investment protection provisions can be enforced. Again, the emails I received give the impression that this is something we are setting up in favour of multinationals in order to allow them to gain advantage over our State and our Government. It is a two-way street. What is proposed will give Irish exporters and Irish investors equal protection. Indeed, it also affords the Government and the State protection. Circumstances change. We have seen already how the geopolitical landscape is changing on a daily basis, nowhere more so than in the area of trade. When the current American regime came into place, we thought that trade sanctions, tariffs, etc., were going to be a big issue for us. They have melted into obscurity in light of everything else that is happening. Never before have we, as a country, or our investors and our corporate entities that are gaining from this seen figures such as those to which the Minister referred. As he rightly stated, since the provisional application of CETA, bilateral trade in goods and services has increased from €3.26 billion to €10 billion. The value of Irish goods going to Canada has risen from €900 million in 2016 to €4.1 billion in 2024. The people who are exporting those goods need protection. It cannot be stressed enough that the protection is as much for them as it is for the corporates that will be bringing goods into Ireland. This is in our national interests. Our economy is wide open. We saw the consequences of tariffs last year. We also saw the benefit of the consequences of the tariffs imposed by the USA on Canada and how the Canadians turned in this direction. CETA is only going to blossom. The only winners from it will be Irish agriculture and Irish export industries. That will be the case because of the weakened relationship between the USA and Canada and the tariffs that have been imposed. Anything that puts a barrier in the way of a trade deal involving a country that has an open export economy is ludicrous. As I said at the outset, I support the proposed changes. They have come about on the basis of the recommendation, for what of a better word - Senator McDowell will have a better title for it - of the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court made its decision on a four-three basis. That is a tight game. There probably needs to be scrutiny. I am looking forward to going through the Bill in finer detail on the later Stages as it progresses through the House. --- 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/seanad/2026-05-06/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:54+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-06