Dr. Laurens Ankersmit:

I will respond to Senator Martin's question first, on whether an investor is required to go to a court or whether it can stay within the arbitration system. As an example, if an investor would like to get money from the Government, it can entirely avoid going to an Irish court. It can go to the ICS and if the Government refuses to pay an award, it can go to a court outside of Ireland to enforce that award. The investor can completely avoid Irish courts if it wants to, even though there might be all kinds of constitutional objections to the award ruling from the ICS tribunal.

To respond to how Irish courts compare with the ICS, the Irish compliance committee system is very different from the ICS. It cannot issue binding decisions to Ireland, whereas ICS tribunals can.

I might take the questions from Deputy Duffy and Senator Boylan together. Public policy can be affected by ICS.

I believe that the best system to have is what Ireland already has, and perhaps what South Africa has done in response to investor state dispute settlement, ICSID, claims it has faced due to anti-apartheid legislation it had introduced. That is just to have a national law that seeks to protect foreign investors, that gives them non-discrimination rights, and to allow for domestic courts to protect those rights. The primary responsibility when it comes to upholding rules and law generally should be under a constitutional democratic system. That is a normative point I wanted to make. I will defer to the other experts.