Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Members may have missed the greatest speech ever given but I can start again. This comes down to the investor court system and the fact we do not want to leave ourselves exposed to be sued by large corporations. Dr. Ankersmit said earlier that it will not exactly be small or medium enterprises taking these sorts of action. I would like some sort of detail on corporations' success rates in suing. There was mention of a rate of 28.7%, which seems like a colossal success rate. We all have the fear of being taken over the coals about legitimate expectations of future profits. I suppose that is why it seems that in many trade agreements there is a move away from ISDS. I am thinking about the Americans with the North American Free Trade Agreement or the French looking at changes to the Energy Charter Treaty, etc.

We have already been given details of the chilling effects, such as New Zealand waiting six and a half years because of fears over the Philip Morris case. That is quite clear. Why would we hamstring ourselves by signing up to this? I imagine this could undermine our competitive advantage. We have done an amount of foreign direct investment successfully without signing up to a major amount of ISDS but this could leave us more exposed than others.

I add my thoughts, similar to Deputy Howlin, on non-ratification. It looks like France, the Netherlands, Germany, Cyprus and a number of other countries have serious difficulties with this, and particularly with the ICS element. I do not see it being ratified very quickly and on that basis, it probably leaves less pressure on us. There was mention of the ingenuity of the EU in being able to get through the gap with this, with the provisional application surviving for a considerable period. Could I get some detail on that?