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

The point is that things can change. They have changed in the past largely due to pressure from those members who opposed the old system, which did not include the Irish Government, I note. They have changed again, although not as far as we would like, but they can change back. This is a blank cheque. We do not know what kind of clauses or provisions may be in future trade agreements. We do not know what kind of investor-state dispute mechanisms there will be. We are being asked not just to move on CETA and on Chile, but, in some of the subsections of this Bill, to give a blank cheque for the Minister to make future determination on any kind of future investor-state dispute mechanism without scrutiny, even the minimal scrutiny that CETA has had. By the way, whenever it was scrutinised in the EU committee or elsewhere, it has been found against, and even a committee with a Government majority found against it.

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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