Ms Isolde Goggin:

I want to go back to the point about a sectoral regulator and what it might do. To an extent, this goes back to a previous job I had when I was the telecommunications regulator before joining the CCPC. I would put a sectoral regulator down to four main strands: information gathering; advice; mediation and arbitration; and enforcement. Information gathering is important because it is important for people to know what is going on in the industry, which relates to the point about digging down into the levels and what happens at the levels that are not transparent and where we do not see all the prices being quoted. I put that as a function of the regulator because one must have statutory powers to look for that information. When I was in ComReg we used to publish a quarterly bulletin of the main statistics in the industry. They were provided to us by the industry but we had to make sure that everyone provided them in a format that we could use and that was comparable so we did not get one format from one crowd and a different format from something else. We had to be able to collate the statistics to make a coherent whole. Mr. O'Leary made the point that it is important that farmers get this advice before signing the contracts. The danger with all these things - and we see this to an extent in the existing grocery regulations - is that the imbalance is such that in the case of a big retailer and a small supplier, the retailer is the one with all the lawyers, the corporate staff and so on and it will go in and put a 300-page contract down on the table and say, "Here is where you sign." That is not a negotiation in any meaning of the word, so there must be people who know what their rights are in respect of the directives and, from our point of view, the kinds of producer organisations that are permitted by exemption from competition law under the latest round of the CMO regulation. That kind of thing should help farmers to build scale and to be able to work together.

Then there is mediation and arbitration. There will be rows and matters that will need to be sorted. I made the point earlier that we are not an ombudsman and that we do not do that kind of work. We take cases to court but we do so on behalf of the State, not on behalf of an individual. We say, "The law was broken here so, on behalf of the State, we are intervening." However, this is not to get something back for particular consumers. There is in some areas of consumer law a right to a compensation order but not in the competition law sphere.

Enforcement is a backstop because ultimately one must have a big stick. That is what I would recommend as the functions of a regulator.