Ms Isolde Goggin:

Can I come back to the point that Deputy Barry made earlier about reliance on imports and the need to protect native industries? To an extent, what I am going to say is related to the fact that some of these issues are being examined on a Europe-wide industry level. I appreciate what has been said but it is important to remember that the Germans, French, Danish and everybody else have the same instinct to protect their native industries. Given the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, competition law has an important role to play in keeping markets open for our exports. At the end of the day, we are a small exporting nation and we need access to markets.

Some things could be of concern regarding one of our large export markets. If one has a capacity for a lot of co-ordination at producer level, which is provided for in the milk package, one can get a small number of very big groups of producers at that level. There are fairly rigid codes of practice tying those producers to retailers and one has a very concentrated retail sector. It is concentrated here but it tends to be concentrated elsewhere as well. In Germany, four retailers have 85% of the market. In Sweden, three retailers have 80% while in Denmark there are three retailers with 90%.

If there is a common European-wide system of regulation, it is important that we should be able to get in there as well. I am not saying that we should throw the Irish consumer off the sledge, but it is important that our producers can also get access to retailers in other countries. The system should not be tied up unnecessarily by long-term contracts.

A legal support agency for SMEs was mentioned, but I have never thought about it. It is an interesting idea and we would like to go away and think about it.

As regards monitoring sectors, we have interaction with sectors on an ongoing basis but we do not have a systematic way of sitting down and talking to people. I think the Deputy was talking about putting moral pressure on them, but it is difficult to do that when one has an enforcement side going on. We tend to do one big study every so often. In 2009, it was groceries, while at the moment we are looking at ports which is obviously an important input cost both for imports and exports. We are hoping to report on that by the end of the year.

We are happy about our resource situation at the moment. Between 2007 and 2011 we lost a lot of people when our staff numbers went down. Thankfully, however, we were given sanction to recruit ten extra people, which was great. They are all on board now.

We tend to examine one sector at a time. We can of course consider re-examining the grocery sector but at the moment our interaction with it would be in terms of advocacy. The kinds of things we are doing now include the code of practice and ongoing enforcement issues which we cannot discuss. Mergers also arise all the time and there has been quite a bit of activity on that over the last while.