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

Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

I will happily do so and try to persuade them of where they have gone wrong. Clearly things went wrong before, the Supreme Court declared that and gave a pathway. We are doing our utmost to comply with the advice or suggestions of the Supreme Court with this Arbitration (Amendment) Bill to allow us in Dáil Éireann to ratify the CETA trade agreement.
I will make one more point on if we were to decide not to ratify. This is the big question. The Senator said it does not matter if we do not ratify. If we did not, we would be obliged to formally notify this to the General Secretariat of the Council of European Union prior to any action being required on the part of Commission. The question of discontinuing the provisional application of the agreement in such circumstances would then have to be considered at EU level following the usual EU procedures and provision of the agreement in question. That is a fact. I look forward to Committee Stage.

---

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