Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-28
============================================================

Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

The agreement itself says that states are not going to reduce the level of environmental protection to facilitate trade and investment. I cannot continue to make that point. There has to be some realism to this debate. We keep hearing references to cases and I keep saying that this is a new system that is designed to address some of those concerns. Again, it comes back to the fundamental point that the certainty the trade agreement with Canada has offered, the reduction in tariffs and the openness to trade have generated economic benefits for this country and for our citizens. We cannot take those economic benefits for granted. Anyone here who is active in a constituency with a whiskey distillery or a manufacturer of Irish cream or another specific Irish product will know that these companies are benefiting very directly from the trade agreement with Canada. The same goes for agricultural products as well. Members cannot come into the Seanad to rail against trade agreements and then go back to the farmers in the constituency in which they live to tell them that they voted against trade agreements that have allowed them to sell their produce abroad. For example, 90% of beef products-----

---

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/2026-05-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-28