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

Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

That is well covered. This legislation is about the enforcement of any awards at international level and that is what the constitutional problem was in the Costello case. The judge in the Costello case has said that if the Government wishes to ratify CETA, it will have to change the Arbitration Act and here is a way, the judge suggested, the Government could do it. We have considered that carefully. We have read the judgments as a whole and we have taken the Attorney General's advice. In that context, we drafted the legislation that we have. I, therefore, cannot accept amendments in relation to it.

---

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