Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage (Resumed) Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-28 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland We looked for the grouping because there are multiple examples that we could give. Amendment No. 16 gathers a number of them together. Moving away from the question of what do we need to do to get this passed, those public concerns that related to the investor court components of CETA still stand and have not been addressed. There is a reason whereby anytime a light has been shone on this issue, there has been concern. For example, when the European affairs committee looked at these investor court components, even though there was a Government majority on that committee in the previous Oireachtas, it came down with a 50:50 split. They did not come down in favour of the passing of the investor court component of these agreements. We are moving between the two here. This Bill is about the enforceability and then a lot of the discussion that the Minister of State is asking us to lean into is to constantly reference the fact - bearing in mind that the ICS is only one of the mechanisms possible under the Bill in terms of other agreements - that you do not have precedents from there but that is because it is not established yet. In terms of fantasy and in terms of living on a hope and a dream, the person who is in a position here in this regard, namely, the Minister, is saying that we should not look to what has happened for the past 20 years and the multiple examples of these arbitration dispute mechanisms, the full gamut of which may come in under this legislation. He is saying that we should not look to everything that has ever happened, not in some abstract way but here in Europe and right across the world. The Minister is saying do not look to everything that has ever happened; look to what the Government hopes is going to pan out in this future untested mechanism where very credible people, including, for example, the German judges association, have pointed to the fact that there are not substantial enough differences. On that point of being right and wrong, the fact is the Minister of State is saying we responded. It was pulled kicking and screaming to make changes. The changes that were made were not like some spontaneous effort. They were made by people who criticised the previous system and were correct. Moreover, the criticisms being made now are made by the same people who were right then. In 2016, I brought my first Private Members' business to this House, which passed. It was a motion stating that the EU-Singapore ruling is about to happen and they are almost definitely going to say you have to treat the investor courts bit and the trade bit separately. The Government then disagreed with me and it was wrong. Therefore, the record of who has been right and who has been wrong on this issue is that we were being told there was not a problem about the Energy Charter Treaty, which now everybody has to leave. My amendment No. 20 relates specifically to the ability to achieve our climate action targets. We were told not to worry about that and that it would not affect those issues and yet, Europe has had to withdraw and now Ireland has had to withdraw, specifically because it will block the achievement of our carbon climate targets. In fact, the UN body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, has named investor dispute mechanisms as a whole, not one particular one but all of them, as one of the main blocks to achieving the climate policy changes that we need in order to deliver a liveable planet. Therefore, there is a litany of record and evidence of how this goes, including in the language of those legal companies that tend take this cases and plan to take these cases, and yet there is this plan of preposterous suggestion that we should not worry; it will never happen. It is like saying, "I am just so confident it will never happen that I am willing to sign us up to something". Not only is there a 20-year zombie clause, but we are choosing to accept and give sovereignty to these investor courts. Once done, we cannot take that back on our own. We need the entire European Union to do so. The Minister of State mentioned the right to regulate. Everybody has been explicitly clear. We know the Government can make the law. The question is what it will cost and whether that becomes an obstacle. The obstacles are clearly set out. The Minister of State also mentioned these interpretive agreements about keeping the existing standards, but we have a number of areas which are under-regulated. Does he believe our current action on climate will deliver enough? No, it will not. When we seek to strengthen our policies on climate we will meet challenges. We have seen challenges under the Energy Charter Treaty. Ireland is being challenged right now. We will see challenges if we try to strengthen our climate laws. Home care is an under-regulated area. Despite promises to put it on a statutory basis in the programme for Government, that has not been delivered. When we make that move, we will have exposure because one of the largest actors in that area is a large Canadian company. If we seek to further regulate in the rental area, we will find that the largest landlord in the State is a Canadian company. It is extremely credible and factual that there is a risk now attached to policy and legislation in areas of crucial public policy. A cost may be attached to it due to findings made under this. That is what arbitration bodies can do. The Minister of State can say we do not know what they will do or that maybe they will not do it or he does not think they will do it. That is where we are at. We know the others will do it because they have done it in the past. Those who critiqued correctly the previous agreements have also said that the ICS is slightly less secretive but operates in a very similar way. Those who were right in the past are telling us that there is a problem with the new system. That is the case. That is the arbitration bit. What we are talking about here is the enforcement bit. This is not just about what Mr. Justice Hogan said the Government had to do to get CETA through. --- 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