Mr. Fergal O'Leary:

To go back to the Chairman's original remarks, from my reading of the commentary on the beef crisis over recent months, specifically the commentary on the CCPC, I would be confused myself on what the commission's role of the was. We are working through approximately 180 complaints in this sector and, therefore ,we are a little restricted in what we can say. However, this is a useful opportunity for us to talk about the issues in the sector. It is also important for us to give broad guidelines, as Ms Goggin has just done, about what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. We want to do that and we want to be helpful with that. As Ms Goggin also said, we are updating the information on our website, we are making videos and we are trying to make this is as easy as possible for every business to understand. We go to events. Tomorrow we will be at an event in Athlone called Taking Care of Business. We are there to try to help people to help themselves to be compliant.

Regarding Senator Reilly's question on monitoring, we conduct extensive market surveillance across every sector in the economy. We have social media set up to look at and we monitor press articles. One of the most important parts of our market surveillance is probably the complaints we get. We have 180 complaints in at the moment relating to the agriculture sector, which we are working our way through. When we see an issue we believe is falling into the area where the parties are in danger of breaching consumer law, our approach is to contact them and tell them they are in danger. Then we advise them generally on what they can and cannot do and we give them an opportunity to come into compliance. It is only after that, and after giving people a chance, that we move into the enforcement space. It is generally moved onto different people in the organisation at that point who are trained investigators and specialists.

The Senator asked two other questions that I will cover briefly. We would like more powers. We were in front of this committee several months ago regarding a new European competition network, ECN, plus directive that is coming in over the next 18 months. It will allow us to be much more efficient because we have two broad tracks at the moment. One track is civil enforcement, which takes a long time.

The sanctions in Ireland are not strong, particularly in comparison to other EU jurisdictions.

The other track we have is criminal. I have been through a number of these investigations, as we all have. The burden of proof is set so high in terms of the volume of evidence we must get and the number of investigative steps we must take that we are looking at a number of years before we can get an outcome. We then send the file to the DPP. That is the way it works. We have very good relations with the office but it may or may not take the case. The ECN+ will be a completely different model that will give us more control to do things more quickly, which is why we welcome it. If that could be introduced in Ireland over the next 18 months, we would be looking at a very different competition enforcement regime.

Regarding hearing aids, I have worked in the area of consumer protection for many years and am well aware of some complaints about how these devices are sometimes sold. I am not aware of the number of complaints we have received but we will check that and come back to the Senator Reilly - possibly through the committee. We will tell him the number of complaints we have received and the actions we have taken as a result.