I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I will be sharing time with my colleague Deputy Bacik. I am pleased to speak on the Competition and Consumer Protection (Unfair Prices) Bill 2023. When I introduced this legislation on First Stage two years ago, the rate of inflation was at levels not seen in decades. A confluence of grim circumstances, some of which were the consequence of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, saw the price of basic staples, such as bread, eggs, butter, pasta and so on, rise in price by close to 20% in some cases over a short period. Allied with post-pandemic supply chain problems, rising energy , transport and labour costs saw input costs more generally climb significantly. Pretty much all of those costs were passed on to hard-pressed customers doing their weekly shop. There was also a clear suspicion, as we will recall, and not without foundation, that multinational corporations, including the big supermarket multiples around whose stores we push our trolleys each week, were using the cover provided by the energy cost crisis to push prices up even further, engaging in profiteering and, in some cases, posting inexplicably high super-normal profits. Indeed, in 2023, that radical left-wing hotbed, the European Central Bank, ECB, warned that large corporations were using the energy crisis to boost their margins. In 2023, the chief economist of the ECB, Mr. Philip Lane, warned that companies across Europe were using what became a gradual fall in input costs to boost their profits, perhaps keeping the prices of goods and services artificially high for longer than the market could justify instead of passing on lower prices to consumers. This form of profit taking at the expense of consumers has an apt term of its own, namely, greedflation. Professor Lane, who is a former Governor of the Irish Central Bank and, indeed, who worked in Trinity College, said the easing of some supply chain bottlenecks had not made its way into retail prices. This was despite producer prices decreasing strongly in the last while. He said this had enabled some firms to increase their profit margins. Two years on from the start of the cost-of-living crisis, the price of the every day goods on which we all rely and the services on which we depend are still high. Input costs have come down, stabilised or plateaued. The pace of underlying inflation has slowed but the cost of the weekly shop in the last 12 months has shot up by 5%. Wage growth this year is expected to average 3.66% so the hard-earned euro in your pocket is expected to stretch ever further. The UCC economist, Oliver Browne, writing on the RTÉ website recently, said he holds out little prospect of grocery prices falling anytime soon. He said that "while some global pressures may ease, others, such as climate change, labour costs, and geopolitical uncertainty, are likely to persist." He further said that "global volatility means that significant price drops were unlikely in the short term." That is an interesting prediction for a number of different reasons. With elevated grocery prices now sticky, my fear, and the fear of my Labour Party colleagues, is that the threat of a tariff war between the European Union and the US, and the disruption that would create in global trade, while having a real impact on the cost of doing business, will end up giving some large, dominant corporations carte blanche to usher in a new wave of price hikes at the supermarket and lay the blame at the door of tariffs. It was energy costs a couple of years ago; it is now tariffs sneaked in under the cover of circumstances that are beyond most people's control. A repeat of what we saw in 2023 is likely to be on the cards and we are still living with the very real consequences of that period for working families across this country. The cost-of-living crisis has not gone. It was elevated in 2023 but there is a permanent cost-of-living crisis across this country, especially for those who are on low, middle and fixed incomes. Of course, high grocery prices affect those on low and fixed incomes most adversely. The answer from Government during the early days of the cost-of-living crisis - note that I say "early days" because we are still in a cost-of-living crisis - was to bring in a series of much-trumpeted one off payments, some of which were famously untargeted and universal in nature. It then slavishly repeated that over and over again for longer than was capable of being justified. Throwing money at a problem is not always the solution. The one thing Government parties repeatedly seem to be ideologically incapable of doing is to make regulatory interventions to bring major corporations to heel - normal kinds of interventions you would see in a regulated market economy, even if there are arguments that might suggest the potential for the abuse of dominant positions in market places, especially where weak or limited competition is not working in the best interest of the consumer. This is where competition and consumer protection law aligns. We are not good at protecting the interests of the consumer in this country. All of the evidence over the years has shown that. Competition and consumer protection law are intertwined. You cannot have one without the other. In short, the question of potential abuse of dominant positions in marketplaces is actually at the heart of what this Bill seeks to address. Two years on from the height of the grocery price inflation spike, the cost of the basics is still extremely high. To give some examples, we have noticed ourselves from our weekly shopping that the price of a 1 Ib of butter is on average €4.69 at the moment. That is a 26% rise in a year, according to the Central Statistics Office. Kantar, the grocery price consultancy well known across the world, said price inflation in supermarkets is double what it was last year. What is the practical effect of this? All of this means a typical family will need to earn an extra €4,000 before tax to merely stand still when it comes to the price of a weekly shop. Two years on the from the initiation of this Bill, the case for its enactment and for more tools to be made available to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, is still strong. We know that pricing structures in the grocery trade are complex. We understand that. The retail trade is complex. It is hard to definitively rule out the possibility of price gouging among major retailers - keeping prices high for so long with a slow rate of decline. In response to the Labour Party's advocacy and campaigning two years ago on the impact of high grocery prices on Irish consumers, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission decided, at the request of the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, to initiative a form of a desktop analysis on grocery prices in this country. Insofar as it could, it sought to address the question of potential price gouging in supermarkets. I welcomed that assessment, which it published around this time two years ago. It made some very peculiar affirmations, though, that I dispute. I dispute them for a couple of reasons. Principally, it said that no evidence of price gouging of customers by large multiples was evident in the Irish market. I posed this question to it then and I repeat it now: how can you definitively rule this out when nobody - no agency and the public more generally - has any access whatsoever to reliable information on profit margins and profits more generally in the Irish grocery trade and supermarket sector? At best, I thought it was unwise for the CCPC to make that claim without the information it needed to make a definitive judgment. This Bill seeks to bring greater transparency to the structure of the large supermarket businesses in Ireland and the sector more generally and to end the secrecy on pricing and profit margins. It is in the interest of consumers and competition. When we published this Bill two years ago, the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, said he would take steps that would lead to big supermarket players publishing their profits and being compelled to make the prices they charge their customers clearer. Since 2023, that Government and its new iteration has taken a vow of silence on this issue. There is nothing in the programme for Government that commits to an initiative like this. Nothing has happened. This Bill would amend the Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014 and address this fundamental problem while arming the regulator with real enforcement powers to bring giant retailers to heel and ensure more transparency and fair pricing at the checkout. It would allow the CCPC to undertake a deep study and analysis of the costs large retailers incur, the profits they take and the prices they set, giving us a much clearer insight into how supermarkets in this country operate and what their pricing structures are. It would bring the kind of transparency to this market that has been sorely missed for far too long. I hope we can make progress on bringing this legislation to Committee Stage for further interrogation. I understand that on Tuesday, Cabinet decided not to oppose this legislation. That is a good thing but I believe, especially given the fact we are entering into a very uncertain period with potential tariffs and so on, it is really important that the CCPC is empowered to stand up for consumers. We should use this legislation to empower it to do just that and to make our supermarkets honest.
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Was it during one of Ivana's lectures?
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Exactly
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I thank the Minister of State for his response. Both he and I live in the real world. Who we are and where we come from insists we do. We shop in the same places and in the same supermarkets and we see what is going on. We are connected into that and the concerns of the working families we all represent. The Bill itself is a modest proposal. I am not suggesting and never did at any point, despite the public clamour a couple of years ago, that we should, for example, introduce price controls, because they have inadvertent consequences. Grocery price orders went out a long number of years ago and for very good reason. One of the reasons at the time was because it was supposed to usher in competition, but we know, compared with analogous EU states, we have very limited competition in the supermarket sector here. That goes back to the potential for abuse of a dominant position. We will never get the full picture in terms of the operation of the Irish retail groceries trade if there is no obligation on those involved to publish and share their profits, in a way that respects commercial sensitivity. Nobody is expecting any operator to simply come out and say this is what they are doing, and they are entitled themselves. The supermarket sector in Ireland and elsewhere is composed of different corporate models. We still have some independently owned businesses. We have international businesses and multinational corporations that are traded on the stock market and so on. We have different company formations and we need to take account of that. As I said earlier, we cannot say definitively there is not a form of price-gouging occasionally going on in the Irish supermarket sector if we do not have access to all the information to allow us to make that determination. The CCPC simply does not have that information. This modest proposition seeks a way in which we can do that in order to bring greater transparency to the Irish supermarket sector. We hope this will lead to greater fairness for Irish consumers, who have been stiffed at the checkout. A number of years ago I likened the trip to the supermarket to do the weekly shop to being as welcome as a visit to the dentist. It was and still is very difficult for people. It is becoming as expensive as a trip to the dentist also. That goes to show that the cost of accessing services, more generally, is increasing. Nobody is saying the State should take out a large hammer and decide to make all kinds of interventions, which never worked in the past, and pretend they will work now. As I said, this is a modest proposal. I am open to introducing amendments which would fine-tune and streamline legislation, and address some of the apparent inconsistencies that may be inherent in the Bill. The Government understands the principle and what it is we are trying to achieve. For example, it is absolutely right that we make a distinction between SMEs and larger corporations. The Minister is entirely right that when it comes to competition, consumer law and prices throughout the economy, when competition law and consumer law are not working the way they were intended, good businesses are impacted. These are businesses that comply with the law, employ people fairly and do their business fairly. Good and proportionate regulation weeds out the cowboy operators and sends a message that we will not tolerate how they operate. When there is greater transparency around pricing structures and the operation of a large sector like this that is so important to our everyday needs, it encourages better behaviour and practice and it weeds out that bad practice. There are debates on going throughout the world, and I am always attracted to the writings of Mr. Robert Reich, a US academic, economist and former labour secretary under President Bill Clinton. As I did earlier, he talks about how it is not always the job of the State to resource people to deal with the increased cost of living. There are questions around wages, collective bargaining and ensuring workers gain more from their productivity, but there is also a significant role for the State with regard to regulating markets. We have seen trammelled and record profits from large corporations in recent years. There have been examples of enormous profit taking. That is an inequality. The distance between working people and those who run these major corporations has grown, and there has been a multiplier effect. We see CEOs of corporations who used to earn 20 or 30 times what someone on the factory floor would make, earn 300, 400 or 500 times that amount. That encourages the rise of populism and creates the political problems we now have in the world. There is a job for Government to do regarding smart and proportionate regulation. That is what this Bill is about. I welcome Government TDs not opposing it. I wish to work with the Government to get this to Committee Stage and nuance and finesse it because if we do, and if we succeed in getting it enacted, we will empower the CCPC to do more. I accept there is legislation empowering the CCPC that could be better used and applied to regulate the sector, but there is no legislation anywhere that for example, compels supermarkets to share information that they need to share with our regulators if our regulators are to be respected and empowered. I accept that improvements can be made and I want to do that. If we enact something like this, the consumers of Ireland will thank us for it, and so will all the decent businesses.
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