Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026: Committee Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-09
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Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland

If we look at this combined with section 11 - that is why we opposed section 11 - whereby the Minister in relation to the AI office can "give a direction in writing to the Office requiring it to comply with such policies of the Government relating to AI" and it must comply with it. The Minister can write and say, "Here is the Government policy, you need to do it." However, if that CEO comes into an Oireachtas committee and things go wrong and the committee members are rightly asking what happened and why things are going wrong, they cannot say that they followed a policy and this is the consequence of the policy. The consequence is the problem. They are being gagged and silenced in terms of being able to give honest answers to committees when they seek to respond to issues which may very well arise in an area riddled with high risk or an area that has subcategories of high risk. If there is so much risk, the more information, the better and the more transparency, the better. At the moment, the Minister can tell them do something that is Government policy. They come into a committee to talk about what has happened and they are not allowed to say, "We feel it may have been mistake. This has had an inadvertent consequence. Here is something which has arisen since we changed the policy last June from what we had in May." They are really consequential things and they are not going to be able to speak about it. There is no other word for that other than being gagged. They are going to sit there and say that they cannot comment. How useful is that to the body politic if it to tries to deal with problems that arise?

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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