Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-20
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Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel

If Ireland ratifies CETA or the EU-Chile agreement, enforcement of awards made by investor courts will become a necessitated obligation of EU membership within the meaning of Article 29.4.6° of the Constitution. This was outlined in the judgment of Mr. Justice Charleton, who highlighted that any domestic legislation permitting the refusal of enforcement would conflict with the duty of sincere co-operation under Article 4(3) of the Treaty on European Union. If this is challenged in the Court of Justice of the European Union, then Irish courts will, in black and white, be required to automatically enforce awards. This will bring us back to square one with the constitutional issues the Costello ruling identified with ratification. Mr. Justice Hogan appeared to recognise this difficulty in his judgment. In paragraph 86 of his judgment, he observed that:
...were an Irish court to contemplate a refusal to recognise a CETA award post-ratification ... compliance with CETA would then be a “necessitated obligation” of the [European] membership ... of the [proposed] Article 29.4.6 of the Constitution.
He went on to state that:
There would be at least a question mark as to whether an Irish court could properly refuse to recognise a CETA award by reference to some domestic ordre-public -style considerations having regard to the duty of sincere co-operation contained in Article 4(3).
Therefore, once the Government proceeds to ratify CETA, it appears the mechanisms envisaged in this Bill will be null and void. Therefore, the Bill cannot claim to address the constitutional issues raised by the Costello case, which I do not believe it does in any case.
This amendment would have inserted a new section 25B into the principal Act to condition commencement of section 25A on the Government submitting a declaration to the European Commission that Ireland will allow its courts to oversee the enforcement of claims made under international agreements referred to in section 25A. It would also have required confirmation from the Commission that such a declaration was valid and the provisions of which would not conflict with the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, the Treaty on European Union or case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Furthermore, it would have required other parties to such agreements – Canada in the case of CETA - to acknowledge the declaration and accept its provisions.
To be clear, I do not believe the European Commission or, indeed, Canada would accept this. The Commission would rightly say that Ireland’s ratification of CETA means that it is now an obligation of its EU membership. The Canadian Government would rightfully say that CETA does not envisage domestic court oversight of awards and that the institution of such a process breaches the agreement. The same problem would arise for the EU-Chile agreement. The best way to describe what the Government is doing here is to say it is adopting a hope-no-one-notices approach. It is hoping the public does not notice that the State is exposing itself to the worst form of corporate capture, as well as hoping that the Commission does not notice that it is advancing legislation that is likely to breach EU law.
It must hope that the Commission does not notice that it is advancing legislation which is likely to breach EU law. The Government has tied itself up in legal knots to create a system that is clearly not going to work.

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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