Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Naughten for giving me some of his time at short notice. The Bill is an omnibus Bill. Rather than going into the anatomy of the Bill, I will look at the overview. There are more than 70 new Members of this 31st Dáil. This is territory that the experienced and longer serving Deputies will have been familiarised with over the years. It is an omnibus Bill that addresses three main areas; the amalgamation of the National Consumer Agency and the Competition Authority; the changes to competition and consumer law, including making provision for the regulation of the grocery goods sector; and the recommendations of the advisory group on media mergers. That is a really broad spectrum. To be able to get an authoritative handle on that would require a huge amount of focused time.

It is very important to take up the themes of experienced contributors here such as the points made by Deputies Naughten and Penrose. Deputy Penrose spoke about the disappearance of the corner shop. This affects not just the village shop, but shops in smaller towns which are being displaced by large supermarkets - from the corner shop as we call it in English to the carrefour as the French call it, which is the crossroads scale of doing business.

We need to be careful about the opportunities for the production of the consumer goods we consume - the farmer, producer, grower and so on. If we allow the power of the multinational-scale operators to dictate what goes on in the marketplace, we will lose that sense of innovation and creativity. There are levers that can be used quite apart from the usual regulatory ones. We could target taxation at the larger multiples and have a differentiated corporate taxation arrangement and a relief taxation or compensating arrangement for sole traders or smaller producers who have been conducting business effectively and honourably for a minimum number of years. It is a different way of looking at things and I invite the Minister and his officials to look more closely at it.

Loss leaders, below cost selling and the alcohol problem must be addressed. It is not good enough to just tinker at the edges and look at the algebra of what has happened in the past and what can be done about it. There is a physical challenge, which is to get the stuff out of the reach of people who should not be consuming it and work towards that. We need to work out how we can do that in terms of pricing or physical obstacles to obtaining it. We must work from simplified first principles rather than looking at the labyrinth of rules, regulations, papers and articles that exist at the moment. We need to clean the blackboard, start from first principles and simplify.

I believe the framing of this Bill is a bit unfair. It is called the Competition and Consumer Protection Bill but that is not what it is. Its constituent elements are highly complex, convoluted and labyrinthine. Maybe the Bill should have been produced in three parts so that we would have an idea of what level of investigation and consideration needed to be applied. An omnibus approach is not ideal. We are all in favour of consumer protection but this Bill is not really framed honestly.

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