Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-06
============================================================

Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach

The Minister of State is welcome. The Arbitration (Amendment) Bill is an important step towards enabling Ireland to ratify key trade agreements, including CETA and the EU-Chile agreement, as well as similar arrangements with partners such as Vietnam, Singapore and Mexico. Like Senator Daly, I am not going to go over all the information that the Minister of State gave. However, like everybody in this House, I have received a lot of correspondence in the past couple of days about this arrangement. What the Minister of State has reiterated is that the Bill does not ratify any of these arrangements. Ratification will proceed in line with constitutional requirements and will require further governmental and parliamentary approval. That is to acknowledge some of the points that have been made.
CETA has removed 98% of tariffs, lowered costs and boosted competitiveness for Irish exporters. Trade has grown, as we have said already, from €3.2 billion in 2016 to over €10 billion and has supported jobs across many key sectors. Full ratification would build on this by providing legal certainty, encouraging further investment and creating more opportunities, especially for our SMEs.
The Minister of State indicated that it cannot be argued successfully that we have secured the trade aspects of the agreement and, therefore, do not need to ratify the agreement in full. The status of our ratification is regularly raised bilaterally by Canada and the European Commission. The Minister of State has answered many of the questions that have been put to everybody in the past couple of days. Obviously, there will be ample opportunity, as we proceed through Committee and Report Stages, to go through this in further detail, but just to break this down, it is about keeping Ireland open, competitive and connected to our global markets. It enables Ireland to ratify modern EU trade agreements that support jobs, expand opportunities for Irish businesses, especially SMEs, and strengthen our position as a trusted trading partner. At a time of global uncertainty, backing rules-based trade sends a strong signal that Ireland is pro-European, pro-business and open for investment. Crucially, it does this by fully protecting the State's right to regulate in the public interest and ensuring a fair and transparent system for resolving disputes.

---

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