Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

I have two points. One is the point that Deputy Gibney made. The Minister of State denied that she gets to appoint the CEO. For now, until the establishment of the board, she has total power in appointing the CEO. That is the truth. That is what is set out in the legislation. Afterwards, she still gets to pick the CEO. She picks the CEO from a shortlist, which is done by the Public Appointments Service, but she does pick them. The Minister of State may feel free to correct me if I am wrong in that. I am not sure her strong rebuttal of Deputy Gibney really holds up.
My second point is that probably the worst thing in this Bill is the inclusion of the mandate of promoting and fostering AI innovation and literacy in the AI office. This is financial regulator stuff, where the financial regulator was promoting finance and simultaneously regulating finance. You cannot be poacher and gamekeeper at the same time. They point in opposite directions. If the Government wants to have a body whose job it is to promote AI literacy and so on, it can knock itself out, but it should not be the same person and office that is supposed to be regulating and ensuring this does not cause harm to society. That is the whole problem here. It will have both the good mandate and the bad mandate set up together in this one office. It is sitting under the auspices of, and not really independent of, the Department of enterprise, which is very much on one side of that equation. That is the fundamental problem. The Minister of State can make the case to have people advocating for fostering AI innovation and literacy and so on, but the idea that the body carrying out that function will also be the regulator is very problematic.

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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