Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-28
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Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

The Government has not said that. The CETA agreement says the opposite, as does the CETA joint interpretative instrument. The European Court of Justice said the opposite. All the legal advice said the opposite.
On the companies the Senator mentioned, it is very unfortunate that we have started to bring individual companies into the debate as if they are some threat to the State. I do not know those companies or who they are, but it is not fair to mention them in the Seanad as some kind of threat to the State. The legal advice those companies will have is the same as the legal advice the Government is receiving and I am outlining here. They would not have a right to sue the State in the circumstances that Senator Higgins and many others described. This is well established. It could not be written any clearer. It is simply not the case that the right to regulate is accompanied by some cost. That is a moving on of the argument. It is a moving of the ground of the argument because the argument does not stand up. We could not be clearer that this does not arise. I have said this at length. The courts have said it at length. Some Supreme Court judges have stated this as well. I cannot put it any further than this - what the Senators are saying is simply not correct. This is about investment. We want Irish companies to do in Canada what Canadian companies are doing here, which is investing, providing services, selling goods and employing people. That is what we want to do because that is how we raise our funding for the State - by generating taxes - and it is how people can get jobs, employment and have the good life.
There is a fundamental disagreement on this between both sides of the House.

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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