Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-28
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

The right to regulate is meaningless. It is like giving somebody the right to breathe. It literally has nothing to do with it. The right to regulate was not impinged on by other agreements. What other agreements did was to have a cost attached. This concerns a tribunal making awards for compensation. It is not about whether a thing can be done, but about how much it costs. We know that how much it costs can, effectively, lead to a chilling effect, where things do not happen and legislation is not made and where it becomes impractical in some cases and impossible in others for governments to legislate and deliver the public policies that they may wish to deliver. We have a litany of examples of that.
That was true in the past and it is true under the terms of the ICS. To be very clear, all that is referred to here is an agreement providing for the making of awards pursuant to investment dispute resolution provisions. There is no exclusion in this Bill as to which investment dispute resolution provisions may be applied in relation to other agreements. We will come back to this later, but it is a pig in a poke. We do not know. The Minister of State may state his intention in respect of which kinds of trade agreements he intends to sign up to personally, but he may be gone in a few years' time. Perhaps he will be here for decades. Who knows? The point is that any future Minister will be able to add any other kind of future agreement with any other kind of future investment dispute resolution mechanisms attached. The Minister of State will say that it will have to be approved by the Dáil-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-28