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

Thomas Byrne (FF), Meath East

If the thing collapses, all those jobs - not just in Ireland but across the EU - that depend on trade with Canada could be lost. I am sorry it is not fashionable to talk about the fact that we need international agreements that have some elements of compromise and an element of sharing of sovereignty, but they bring huge benefits to us all. The EU itself is the classic example of all that.
The Supreme Court has given us guidance as to how to do this in a constitutional way. The Government is obliged to examine and take very seriously what the Supreme Court says and we have done that and done it really carefully. Anybody who reads the Supreme Court decision of Mr. Justice Hogan and then reads this legislation will see that the Government is trying to implement this constitutionally. That is all we are trying to do, because we have seen the benefits. I hope we will succeed. I hope the Seanad will support this and I hope the Dáil will support further trade agreements that require us to ratify them because we know that when we have trade agreements we benefit hugely from them. It is about time we started talking about the benefits of these trade agreements. That is how our employment is in this country. We have taxation coming in that is entirely dependent on international trade. There are not enough people on this island just to sell to ourselves and so we decided to branch out, first into the European Union and then around the world. Look at our factories. Eli Lilly in Kinsale produces the whole world's supply of Mounjaro. The botox factory in Westport produces the whole world's supply. We would not have enough people to use these products in Ireland so we are selling to the world. We cannot do that without trade agreements and this trade agreement does it with Canada. It has investor protection clauses in it and items the Opposition questions but the overall benefit is to the greater good of all the people of the country.
Trade is complicated. Negotiations are tricky. Legal texts have to be read and studied very carefully. I will not take criticism for quoting the text of the agreements we are signing up to, because that is what anyone would expect all of us to do. I was criticised for that because it did not conform to the established views of the Opposition, but the benefits-----

---

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