Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-20 ============================================================ Nessa Cosgrove (LAB), Labour Panel Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. As I said on the last Stage, I would go so far as to say this is reckless. I would actually call it dystopian. I think we are walking into a situation that will be irreversible. I know the Minister of State comes from a legal background. It is great to be a Member of a House where there are so many legal minds. However, I do not understand why the Government is supporting this. I do not see any justification for it. Both Ireland and Canada have mature legal systems, with both deriving from the British legal system. We have an existing, mature legal system in this country. Why are we creating a parallel justice system that can override our own legislation and the legality that we have here? It makes no sense. As Senator Higgins said, not only is there going to be a financial cost, but there will be an effect on the budget in each Department. We can see there is an overspend in budgets as it is. We can see that we are not meeting our climate targets and we are paying fines. In each budget, if we are going to get sued, is this going to be part of it? It beggars belief. I live in the north west. Under the NAFTA agreement, we have seen that Canada itself has been sued by an investor court because of Quebec and its decision to ban fracking. The current Government seems to be ploughing ahead and it is not committing to investing in renewable energies. However, if a Canadian investor decides to invest in LNG infrastructure, and if the Government sees sense or if a new government comes in and says it will not invest in that because it is madness, then we are liable because the loss of profits of a Canadian company that might have invested in fossil fuel infrastructure means it will be able to sue us. It beggars belief. It does not make sense why we would want to create a system like this, particularly when we are proud of our judicial system. The Minister of State is from a legal background. Why would we want to create an alternative court system in parallel to what we have already? I am not exaggerating in saying it is dystopian. We are talking about sovereignty. We are going to place the democratic will of a sovereign State, Ireland, on an equal par with corporate organisations. This is the stuff of nightmares if it happens. It is bad enough that we can see throughout current Government policy that we are handing over certain deals and contracts to private organisations. I brought up last week the issue of childcare being sold off for profit to multinational chains, and we see the mess that is already happening in the housing sector. Now, we are giving investors a legal entitlement to sue our independent, sovereign State that we fought so hard to get, if we implement policies that affect their ability to make profit. We are having this discussion but, unfortunately, the Government has such a big majority in this Chamber. In this debate, we are reasoning with the Minister of State to listen to the Opposition. I know he has come in to listen but I ask him to please take on board what we are saying. As Senator Stephenson said, this is our last opportunity in the Seanad to raise this. If this legislation goes through, it will be 20 years, at minimum, before it can be overturned. I am appealing to the Minister of State in this regard. We have amendments that we want to discuss, but they have been ruled out of order. We will stay for the debate and, hopefully, we will be able to talk about them at some stage. I am not exaggerating by saying that we are walking into a dystopian reality. --- 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/2026-05-20/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:58+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-20