Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown I move amendment No. 1: In page 11, between lines 15 and 16, to insert the following: “ “Service” means the Public Appointments Service;”. This first set of amendments speaks to the establishment of the board but first I wish to address the parliamentary scrutiny, or lack thereof, of this legislation, which is so disappointing. It is 11 calendar days since the text of this Bill was published. We have had four Dáil sitting days and seven working days to scrutinise this absolutely crucial Bill. Providing 11 calendar days between publishing the text and enacting the law is not parliamentary scrutiny. That does not give us as members of the Opposition any opportunity to engage properly with this legislation and provide for amendments. It is a disgrace. I have valuable insights and I want to work on the governance of AI. I established a State agency, which is arguably the most independent State agency. I was its inaugural director between 2014 and 2016 and later I led it for four years as chief commissioner. I have knowledge I can contribute to this. I worked in the tech sector for eight years. I have a lot to add. I sit on the AI committee and the culture, communication and sport committee where we regulate the tech sector. I attended the pre-legislative scrutiny at the enterprise committee and I could even see, between those three committees, the gulf in understanding. AI is technical, complex and we have learned a lot on the AI committee but we were not given the opportunity to engage effectively with this Bill. Instead it went through pre-legislative scrutiny at the enterprise committee and now it is being rushed through the Dáil even though the Government has known it is coming down the track for years. I am genuinely disgusted at how this is being handled. It is a travesty of democracy that this is all the opportunity we get to discuss it. My amendments in this grouping are amendments Nos. 1, 15 and 20. They speak to the Public Appointments Service process for the appointment of the board. A lot of these amendments, especially in the first half of the legislation, are to strengthen the governance of this office to make it more independent. Although the Minister of State said in her statement she appreciates the independence of the office, that this is reinforced by it being a stand-alone body, etc., there are multiple clauses in the Bill that go against that. We will speak later to the fact the Minister gets to appoint the first CEO without any involvement by the Public Appointments Service and the fact the CEO cannot comment on government policy. Besides that, the appointment of the board itself should strive towards the greatest level of independence. These amendments try to essentially put in place a gold standard through the involvement of the Public Appointments Service, as distinct from the Department, so the office can act on its own. I am familiar with the State boards process. I have issues with the process as it stands. There is a bang of window-dressing off it at times. Obviously it was moved and developed because there was criticism of the fact that Ministers in the past were cherry-picking appointments at board level across many State agencies. Regardless, it is better at least than direct appointments by the Minister. It is important we use the mechanisms that are available to us in the Public Appointments Service to appoint board members and these amendments set out to do exactly that and to make sure we can do that. Also, rather than the Minister having that oversight, other parts of the amendments in this grouping allow for the Government to do it rather than the Minister, which again allows for that increased independence. I have been critical from the outset that the entire approach of this Government and officials in Brussels, and indeed the Brussels mindset, is that we regulate AI through the lens of industry and business. That is not good enough because it leaves out the competence we need to deal with the rights and protections that are under threat from AI. If we do all this with an enterprise lens, which is what this legislation does, we do not do that. We do not bake in the competence at the outset that we need to protect our citizens from the harms AI is going to inflict on us, which we see around us already. The algorithms we are all using, which are making us addicted to products and which are prompting chatbots to push people towards suicide, are the harms AI is wreaking on society. To treat it as an enterprise issue and the governance as an enterprise-informed operation and mechanism ignores all that. What we get from Government instead is it saying we have to protect rights. It says that at the end of the sentence after talking about balance and consideration but the issue is it is not doing it. These amendments try to strengthen that independence that will ultimately help with that balance and bring in the competence about rights and protections. --- 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/dail/2026-06-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-30