Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-09
============================================================

Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin

I welcome the Minister of State and his officials. I will deal with amendments Nos. 4, 5 and 6 in reverse order. Amendment No. 6 seeks to insert:
“(4) For the avoidance of doubt, awards under an international agreement referred to in subsection (1) shall not be enforceable or recognised in the State if such awards were sought in a foreign jurisdiction or an international body.”.
We have had some very interesting debates in this House over the last number of weeks about the Omagh bombing inquiry Bill. The Minister for justice is a very eminent senior counsel and a person whose legal opinion I would attach great weight to, notwithstanding that one’s professional or industrial experience is not always recognised in this House, it would seem. The Minister made the point that we could not require or compel Irish citizens to give evidence or participate in a judicial process or inquiry that was based in another jurisdiction, albeit on this island. He was really clear about that. I pointed out to him that there were very pressing matters in relation to the Omagh bombing and subsequent attempts to carry out car bombings in Dublin and the UK but he said that, notwithstanding all of that, there could be no crossover between the two jurisdictions. I say this as a layperson who has no legal training whatsoever: I think he is talking about sovereignty there.
This amendment simply asks that we endorse our own sovereignty and say that this “shall not be enforceable or recognised in the State if such awards were sought in a foreign jurisdiction or an international body.” I hope the Minister of State will accept this amendment. It is in our collective self-interest to support it. If the Government is to oppose it, it begs the question as to why we would dilute our sovereign status. Why would we expose Irish citizens to the threat or potential risk of financial exposure?
The State has a record in this regard. During the financial crash and crisis, we adhered to the austerity requirements set out by the members of the troika, who stayed across the road in the Merrion Hotel even though the rest of us were struggling to cope with the severe financial restrictions that were placed on us. The Government agreed that the debt should be socialised - the debt imposed by bankers, property speculators and developers. The narrative was that we had been bailed out by Europe, but that is not what happened. The Irish taxpayer and all our children are still paying that debt. The debt was socialised.
I see a number of contradictions in this regard. On the one hand, the Minister for justice, a senior counsel and very eminent lawyer, says that we cannot compel witnesses to participate in a judicial process that is set up in another jurisdiction, yet if the Minister of State rejects this amendment, he is saying that when it comes to exposing the Irish citizens to financial risk, we are quite happy to allow third parties and other interests to come in and speculatively take claims. As Senator Stephenson said, why would they not?
Amendment No. 4 states:
In page 4, to delete lines 14 to 19 and substitute the following:
“(3) For the avoidance of doubt, it is hereby declared that an award made by a body empowered to make awards pursuant to an international agreement to which this section applies is not, and never was, enforceable in the State if enforcing the award would ...
As I know everybody in the House can read, I will not continue to go through it. Again, it speaks to our Constitution. I will be 60 in August. I grew up in the Republic before we joined the European Union. It was the time of what was called the pitchfork and the candlestick when we were building social housing for our citizens. I remember in Finglas seeing the prefabricated houses being transported along Ballygall Road East to Ballygall and Finglas village and out into Finglas west and Finglas south. In a State that was not a member of the European Union and had no access to European funding or foreign direct investment as we have now, and as one of the poorest countries in Europe, our grandparents felt that social housing was a social good and not a commodity or something to speculate on. We joined the European Union. We had the Jack Charlton years. I remember the mass emigration of the eighties. I did my leaving cert in 1984. My youngest fellow is doing his today. He just completed his biology exam. By Christmas of 1984, only three of my class were left in Ireland. The rest of them went to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, where our kids are going now, because they offered them a life.
My point about this is that the neoliberal economic agenda is writ large ideologically and philosophically within this document.
That position has been endorsed, reinforced, carried out and executed by the Government since 2011, when a Taoiseach was appointed who promised us new politics and a fair deal. What has been the cumulative effect of that? In my lived experience, it means that my 25-year-old, my 24-year-old, my 22-year-old and my 18-year-old have no prospect of owning a home of their own. If you want to buy a one-bedroom apartment in Dublin, you have to be in the top 10% of earners in the European Union. If you want to buy a two-bedroom apartment, you have to be in the top 1% of earners in the European Union. Here are amendments that ask the State to indemnify our citizens at this point against the risk of exposure to interventions from outside our jurisdiction because we have learned that international debt can be socialised and levied on the Irish taxpayer by a Government that imposed austerity as though it were a virtue. I will say that I do not think that anybody in Fianna Fáil intended for the crash to happen. It was misadventure. However, the policies of austerity were premeditated and carefully calculated to inflict pain on the most vulnerable people in our society. In my family, our disabled son lost all of his services. He has never had physiotherapy in a meaningful sense. He has never had speech therapy or occupational therapy or any of those things in a meaningful sense. As a consequence, his life is significantly limited. As a parent watching that, it causes moral distress and injury. When the then Minister, Paschal Donohoe, was in the House for statements on the financial forecast for Ireland, it was interesting that when I made those points to him, he got visibly angry. He said that I had no idea how difficult it was to make those types of decisions around austerity. What he said to me was, "It hurts us more than it hurts you."
I ask the Minister of State to understand that the spirit and motivation of the people in this House putting down these amendments is to protect our collective interests. We remember how the Government has behaved in the past. On the one hand, it declared our sovereignty to be inviolable and stated that we cannot compel people to give evidence that would contribute to the public good in terms of contributing to knowledge over the Omagh bombing, the largest massacre in the history of the Troubles. It cannot do that but, you know what, like it did with the troika and austerity, the Government is quite happy to reject these amendments so that international capital and international liberal economic market forces can further strip money from what should be a wealthy republic but in actual fact is one where if you are trying to start a family, trying to build, get or buy a house or trying to make all of those decisions to self-actualise as a citizen, or if you are sick or elderly, you are in big trouble. That is not the Republic I remember from the 1970s and 1980s, notwithstanding all the challenges we had.
My grandmother fought in the War of Independence. If she were to read this, she would have a lot to say. There might be a citizens' assembly, like there was in 1916 on O'Connell Street. Our children have been sold out by this generation. We are supposed to be generation X but I would call us generation F, for "fail". Think of everything that our grandparents built up. My father, as a garda, was able to live in the community that he policed and was able to send five of his children to university. He did all of that on a garda's wage. Could a garda do that now?

---

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/2026-06-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-09