The Green Party has published a Bill aimed at outlawing the use and breeding of primates for experimentation.
Primates, including great apes, chimps, gibbons, monkeys, marmosets and tamarind, are experimented on for medical research worldwide.
However, Ireland is one of the few EU countries which has not recently experimented on primates, along with Austria, Portugal, Finland and Luxembourg.
The last primates were released from an Irish laboratory more than 10 years ago and no licences to experiment on the animals have been issued since then.
The Department of Health, which licenses animal experiments in this country, has already taken an ethical stance on the issue and states that "it is the practice in Ireland not to license an experiment involving the use of primates."
The Primates Bill, published by Green Party TD Dan Boyle, in association with the Irish Anti-Vivisection Society (IAVS), is a move to have this practice enshrined in law.
Mr Boyle said he and his colleague, Éamon Ryan TD, had sponsored the Bill to give validity to stopping the practice and to ensuring it would never happen again.
"Our concern is that while the Department of Health's code of conduct is commendable, it leaves the door open for primates to be allowed back into Irish laboratories if a large multinational animal testing company requests to use primates," he said.
Yvonne Smalley, IAVS chairwoman, said that leaving aside the actual experimental procedures - many of which caused acute pain and prolonged suffering, it was an appallingly cruel act to confine a highly intelligent and social primate alone in a standard laboratory cage.
