Mr. Fergal O?Leary:

We can provide detailed figures to the committee afterwards on the amount that consumers spend on food. From the study we conducted with regard to Brexit, we found that if there is a hard Brexit or a no-deal Brexit where products could pass across relatively seamlessly, up to €1,000 would be added to a family's food bill over the course of a year.

One of the things we saw there was that the addition of non-tariff barriers would be very significant. That alone shows the scale of the increase and what we also found that was particularly striking was that the greatest proportional increase will be for lower-income groups. That means that consumers who have lower incomes and who obviously have less to spend and have less disposable income are putting more of their income towards food and that generally goes to the point about how much all consumers pay for food.

On the comments around the proposed directive, which is the nub of the issue from our point of view, it is one of the measures which is aimed at contributing to a fair standard of living for agricultural producers. The current grocery regulations that we are responsible for enforcing are concerned with transparency and certainty. On the Chair's question, we believe that since their introduction, there has been an improvement over the last number of years but we must acknowledge that within the existing grocery regulations, it is about writing down what is agreed and is not about banning particular practices, which is a significant difference to what is being proposed by the EU. That needs to be teased out in terms of the overall aim versus what we are doing at the moment.

I will also address the question of what a sectoral regulator could need. We have spent the last 11 months working on a study of household waste domestic markets. We have looked at this from the point of view of sectoral regulation in general and one of the first things any regulator would need would be the wherewithal to analyse all of the particular parts of the market and that would be a significant undertaking in this case when the sheer number of contracts that would be brought into effect by the proposed regulator are considered. Another thing we suggest is there must be a reasonable deterrent. That is where Ms Goggin's point on the fines comes in. We need to make sure that whatever is proposed will have the impact it should and on that basis, it needs to have teeth. A difficulty that many regulators currently have in Ireland is that they do not have the ability to impose fines and so there are question marks over whether that is a suitable deterrent.