Arbitration (Amendment) Bill 2025: Report and Final Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-09
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

I do not need to speak about the amendment at great length because it is a point that has been made. These are issues of the public interest. They are the concerns which have been expressed very strongly by all across the Opposition. They are very legitimate concerns. They are based on the evidence of every arbitration body that has ever existed, though the Minister of State reminds us that one of the arbitration bodies attached to the CETA is a new one even though of course there is potential for old rules to come in and for other forms of arbitration to be attached to other trade deals with this new mechanism. All the evidence of how this has panned out every time it has been done is that cases are taken against the public interest and the public interest is compromised. That is what we pointed to in the evidence. The risk the Government is taking - it is saying it is a new thing, we do not know how it is going to go but it thinks it is going to go great yet we are telling the Government this is how it has always gone. In every instance, this is how corporations have continuously used these tools again and again. There is text built into the supposed new regime that talks about diluting laws and repealing or modifying them to avoid the bill. The companies that take cases advertise the fact that you can get a country to change its laws without even having to win the case, by just the threat. That is how it is designed to work, and the fact that there has never been a case made that it is really needed because our courts work fine. It is a thing that is wanted by corporations which they added on because CETA started negotiations years ago when these were still in play. They are not adding very much but the Government is asking us to take a risk, just trust and not worry because it thinks it is going to be fine. This reminds me of when I brought my very first Private Members' Bill in 2016 on CETA and the Singapore agreement. The Government argued I was wrong but I was right. The European Court of Justice proved my analysis was correct. I said they were going to treat the trade bit and investor courts separately, that is what was going to happen and that is what did happen. Investor courts are treated separately. That is part of why we have this whole set of decisions. The Singapore ruling-----

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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