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

Joe Conway (IND), Cultural and Educational Panel

I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber again. At what we might call the dénouement of the Bill in the later stages of the evening, I will have a few more things to say. Right now, I will confine myself to a short comment on amendment No. 4 and the proposed new section 25A(3)(c), which refers to something that would "materially impair the capacity of the State to legislate or regulate in the public interest". That is a critical part of the amendment. Even though the EU investment court system, ICS, is designed to avoid the worst abuses of the investor-state dispute settlement, ISDS, the critics in this House and the Lower House have warned that the mere possibility of investor claims could discourage ambitious regulation, especially and critically in areas such as climate policy, public health, labour protections and digital regulation. Those concerns were explicitly raised by Opposition Deputies, who argued that the investor courts "have a massive potential to undermine social and environmental regulations". That matters because Government Departments may become far more cautious down the road when drafting laws if they fear triggering multimillion-euro claims. Even if the State ultimately wins, it is the fear factor that impels all of us. Those of us who have a titter of wit at all look at the court system in Ireland as the last-chance saloon. Politicians of all parties and none have gone to the courts to their great detriment and financial loss. If that is writ large in the context of the State, the whole fact of those multimillion-euro, and possibly multibillion-euro, awards that could be made against the State in relation to fundamental legislation and progressive legislation, there is a chilling effect. It is a sort of Big Brother-like prospect. That is why I strongly support amendment No. 4.

---

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