Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-20
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Michael McDowell (IND), National University of Ireland

It will not happen. It simply will not. The European Court of Justice will say that, if we had written it into the agreement as a reservation and a protocol, then anybody investing in Ireland would have to be aware that there was this particular loophole in Irish law that allowed the Irish courts to refuse to enforce the agreement and it does not apply to the courts of any other member states before which such a case was brought. For that reason, the so-called escape hatch that the Supreme Court waved at the time it found in favour of former Deputy Patrick Costello is not worth the paper it is written on as a matter of international law. It is not enforceable. It is of no value to Ireland.
The last point I want to make is on a more general ideological approach. I do not subscribe to any left-wing ideology at all but I do subscribe to this proposition: individual nation states, particularly those with the rule of law and democracy, are the granular guarantors of the rights of citizens, collectively and individually. We are not in some miasma soup where international capital flows around and is accorded the same status as a state. You can call it neoliberal but that is ridiculous. It is elevating capital, including investors' capital, to a height where it is shoulder to shoulder and on equal terms with sovereign states to create this jurisdiction. It is saying that money can out-trump the democratic wishes, properly expressed, of the people of a sovereign, independent nation state. It is all right to have investment courts provided for by agreements but ones that you cannot get out of are qualitatively different.
The question I have to put is why this is being pushed here now. Is it because Mark Carney, the eminently decent Canadian Prime Minister, is shortly to visit us and we want to have something to give him on the way in, like Keir Starmer's letter to President Trump, saying we have done our bit for him? Will the Minister of State be posing with the Tánaiste and the Taoiseach, waving at the Prime Minister Ireland's instrument of ratification and saying this is what we did for him? We are so friendly with Canada, we did this for him. What is the hurry on this if all of those other member states have said they are not ratifying this? Why do we need to do it now? There have been constant statements in the media to the effect that Ireland will do this as a matter of urgency to coincide with Prime Minister Carney's visit to Ireland. That is grotesque.
The very last point I want to make on section 2 is that section 25A does not just apply to Canada.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:58+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-20