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

Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

I am more than happy to. If there were a problem with the right to regulate in the way the Senator has described, although I am saying there is not, I would not be dealing with it here because it would be way too late. You need to deal with it in CETA. The argument I am making is that, on the basis of the very text of CETA, the interpretive statement made and the decisions of the European Court of Justice and, indeed, the Supreme Court, nobody saw an issue with the right to regulate. This is because of the language used. If I agreed with the Senator that there were a chilling effect on regulation, I absolutely would not be addressing it here. I would have addressed it a few years ago when CETA was being negotiated, or I would not have proposed the ratification of CETA to the Oireachtas. I would not be waiting until we had a trade agreement. There are rules for investors, which are to protect Irish companies also, and there are lengthy procedures for dealing with them. In those procedures, we did not forget to refer to the right to regulate. Every t is crossed and every i is dotted as best we can. I would not be doing 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/2026-06-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:01+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-09