This innocuously named Arbitration (Amendment) Bill is a sell-out to the corporations. It is the definition of the corporate takeover of Europe and the Government wants to sign us up to this. If we do, it will be very difficult to get out of it. As Dr. Oisin Suttle in the Maynooth department of law wrote in a thing I was reading this morning, in other areas of international law, where a state signs up to them, you can get out relatively easily. You give a bit of notice. We sign up to international agreements, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, where we give away a bit of sovereignty to these international institutions, but we can get out within six months of doing that. Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union allows member states to leave the EU with two years' notice, but with the investor court system which we are signing up to, we would be bound under the obligations of the investor court system, a parallel justice system which subverts our own legal and legislative systems, for 20 years. We could be potentially sued by corporations which decide that the actions of the courts or a government here infringe on their rights and expectations to make profits. You could not make it up. We will be tied into those agreements for 20 years. As has been said, this is not a hypothetical. This stuff is happening. ExxonMobil, one of the biggest oil companies in the world, has done it. Philip Morris, the big cigarette company, has done it. French waste companies have sued the Argentinian Government. It is happening. As has been mentioned already, on key issues like housing we have IRES REIT, the biggest landlord in the country, based in Canada. If we could succeed in getting Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael out, we could potentially bring in meaningful rent controls, things like no-fault evictions, which I believe should happen, and that land being held by land bankers and speculators should be taken off them. They should not be allowed to hang onto land and speculate on property prices which are significantly causing and exacerbating the housing crisis in this country. While we know that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael do not want to do it, a future government should be free to do the kinds of things the Kenny report proposed - to take the land bank into public ownership. However, this would be prohibited. We could be sued in a parallel legal system, the investor court system, by property investors, vulture funds in other words. Wealth management companies could sue on the basis that they had invested in Irish property and the Government's actions might infringe on their ability to make profits in the future. It is absolutely shocking this is being proposed. As has been said, once we are in, we are in for 20 years before we can before we can get out. It undermines our legislative and judicial sovereignty. It is an absolute outrage. There are potentially many different areas where these investors could sue governments on issues such as bringing in legislation to protect workers' rights to protecting the environment or protecting water quality. There is almost nothing they could not potentially sue a government over or sue courts for making decisions where they infringed on their right to make profits. All of this would be done via a parallel legal system which is only available to corporations and not available to ordinary people. It is really quite shocking and unbelievable but not terribly surprising from a government whose entire policy seems to be to hand things over to investors, hedge funds, vulture funds and big corporations so that they can make profits while limiting the ability of this House or the legal system to ever do anything about it in the future. It is an absolute sell-out. We absolutely oppose this. None of that means we are against trade - fair trade. The idea that we have to give to corporations the right to subvert our legal processes or our democratic processes in order to have trade between countries is an absolute nonsense. It reflects the attitude of the political establishment in this country and in Europe about dancing to the tune of corporations and big business at the expense of the needs, the aspirations and the democratic rights ultimately of ordinary people. We oppose it root and branch.

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It is there.

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