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

Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel

We are left with this debacle that is causing so much angst in this House because fundamentally, it was not given any sort of airing that it deserved because of the importance and gravity the implications therein contained. We hear it is going to be pro-business, pro-Europe and pro-investment and trade but from the Minister’s own figures - the quadrupling of trade in the incidence was one of the figures I caught going up from €3.4 billion to €12 billion over a short number of years - it does not seem there is a crying imperative for this legislation to be created.
Senator McDowell mentioned that there is of course mutual trust in the liberal democracies of the courts. His phrase was that we trust the Canadian courts and they trust ours. If that be the case, why are we going down this avenue of an unnecessary initiative to further complicate the issue and do something that is not in any way progressive? I wonder whether the whole concept of wanting to rush this through so that it can be a performative achievement during the Presidency, or that it might provide a comely photo op of the Taoiseach and the Prime Minister of Canada, Mr. Carney, erstwhile Irishman, is progressive democracy. It sounds more like a Government that is treading down a fairly craven path. I am happy to stand with the Senators who have spoken so trenchantly against this legislation. It seems to be unnecessary and is going to tie the hands of future governments. It is fundamentally anti-democratic because it takes the trust away from the court systems given constitutionally to our country.

---

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