Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-09
============================================================

Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel

Maybe the Minister of State could speak to why we have chosen to pursue a different process from that for other independent State bodies, such as the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission, IHREC, the Data Protection Commission, DPC, and Coimisiún na Meán in this. I was speaking to amendment No. 13 but, actually, all the amendments in that list - amendments Nos. 14, 16, 18 to 26, inclusive, 29 to 31, inclusive, 33, 46, 74, 75 and 89 to 91, inclusive - relate basically to the same concepts of making sure the processes we are following for this independent body are exactly the same and that the model is the same as the other one. Perhaps the Minister of State could speak broadly to that. She does not need to speak to every single amendment since some of them are basically the same in different parts in the legislation, but why are we not matching and replicating the models that exist and function well?

---

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/2026-07-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:11+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-07-09