Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-01 ============================================================ Sharon Keogan (IND), Industrial and Commercial Panel The Minister of State is very welcome. It is great to see her here in the Chamber. I will address the structural flaws in this legislation. Underneath the language of safety, this Bill threatens our economic sovereignty, creates court bottlenecks and sets up hypercritical double standards for the State and the citizen. The Government claims that establishing oifig IS na hÉireann by August gives us first-mover advantage. The Minister of State argues that this early roll-out will provide stability to the market. However, moving before the starting gun fires gets you disqualified. We are rushing into a regulatory fog. This Bill forces a costly enforcement machine into existence by August despite the EU's digital omnibus framework having delayed the actual high-risk rules until December 2027. We are hiring staff and spending millions to referee a match that does not begin for 16 months. This signals to the tech sector that we are trigger-happy and eager to regulate what we do not yet understand. True stability means knowing the rules and the subject matter they regulate rather than forcing employers to guess what an overeager domestic office might do. This brings me to the enforcement framework set out in Part 6, which duplicates the flaws that paralysed GDPR enforcement for years. Every administrative fine is frozen until confirmed by the High Court. Even if a company accepts a fine without appeal, the authority must queue for a High Court date just to activate the penalty. With zero statutory guidelines guiding these investigations, a company could deploy an invasive algorithm in seconds while our legal response grinds on for three to four years. I believe the Government's defence is that, under the Zalewski v . WRC and Pigs Marketing Board v . Donnelly rulings, an unelected regulator cannot penalise someone without a High Court judge signing off. This is a legal straw man. Our Constitution requires a judge to validate a sanction but it does not mandate High Court involvement for every minor infraction. The cases confirmed that lower courts, such as the Circuit Court, are fully capable of conferring constitutional validity on administrative fines. By bypassing lower courts, the Government creates an artificial bottleneck. We need a system where lower value fines under €500,000 take effect swiftly through the Circuit Courts, with strict statutory clocks running on investigations. Without these fast-track timelines, the Bill is a paper tiger. The most offensive element of this Bill is the double standards in how the State treats private employers as opposed to itself. Under section 105, private firms face ruinous multimillion euro penalties tied to global turnover while, under sections 133 and 136, the State caps fines for public bodies at a flat rate of €1 million. This ignores a crucial fact. The highest risk automated systems are not built to sell consumer goods; they are deployed by states. States use algorithmic profiling for welfare, automated housing systems, biometric tracking and many other purposes, yet the machinery of Government has ensured that, if it breaks the law, it will face a relatively inconsequential slap on the wrist. The Minister of State defends this cap by claiming that imposing large fines on Departments of the State punishes the public twice by draining budget from health and education. I will turn that logic back on the Minister of State. If massive financial penalties dangerously drain cash from vital investments, why apply them to private employers? The highly mobile digital economy based in Dublin pays for our State pensions, infrastructure and public sector wages. If a massive fine ruins a private company's budget, it punishes the taxpayer through job losses and a shrunken tax base. If fines are toxic for public services, they are toxic for the private sector as well. The solution is to flatten the fine limits for both public and private offenders using the discretion the EU law allows us, rather than creating a privileged sanctuary for State bureaucracy. We should either do that or dissuade our public bodies by the same fine threshold found in Article 99 of the EU Act. We must also confront how this Bill handles democratic oversight. It scatters enforcement power across a web of 15 separate regulatory bodies, moving executive decisions out of public sight and away from elected representatives. Power is being transferred to unelected authorities in Brussels and Dublin, reducing the Oireachtas to an office that simply pays the bills. Furthermore, the advisory board of this new AI office lacks a statutory requirement to include experts in human rights or consumer protection. It prioritises purely industrial backgrounds, sidelining civil liberties. This legislation approaches the future with deep institutional paranoia, treating human ingenuity as a dangerous liability to be shackled with pre-emptive State permissions. We are telling young developers that they are suspected rule-breakers until they fill out enough paperwork to prove themselves otherwise. It is a rule of trust for the State but suspicion for the creator. We are positioning ourselves as a high-handed hall monitor of the digital schoolyard we did not build. We must remember that; we did not build it. While international hubs invest capital in deep learning and computational infrastructure, Ireland's primary ambition under this Bill is to be Europe's most enthusiastic clampdown merchant. We are penalising local tech before our domestic economy can benefit from it. Only today, it was announced that TikTok is cutting 300 jobs in Dublin. This is not about future hypotheticals. It is real and it is happening now. This illustrates that these companies do respond to regulation. This market is moving faster than we can keep up with. Ultimately, this means that our legislation has to be streamlined and focused, not cumbersome, with enforcement spread across 15 statutory bodies. We must stop this trigger-happy rush. We must fix the High Court bottlenecks by utilising the Circuit Court. We must demolish the double standard shielding public bodies and ensure that we do not cross the starting line so early as to disqualify our entire economy. The Minister of State might take on board that point. I will be proposing amendments on Committee Stage. It is a really important element of the legislation the Minister of State has brought before us today. --- 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/2026-07-01/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:08+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-01