Mr. Matt Ronan:

I would be delighted to do so. We must also remember that when we speak here, we are not just speaking about the 200 businesses we represent. Supplements are being sold within many aspects of retail. About 1,800 plus pharmacies throughout the country are selling food supplements. We can speculate that there are many hundreds of supermarkets that sell them in the same way. For the past 40 years, there was never been a question regarding how we should treat food supplements. We had a few things like juices. If we sold a medicinal product such as plantain juice that did not taste very nice, the fact that its label contained the word "juice" meant that it attracted 23% VAT in the same way as apple juice would. However, there was never a question but that a simple vitamin, mineral, fish oil or a botanical like turmeric, ginger or garlic, which would almost be sold in any corner shop, would attract 0% VAT. I can say that all retailers applied that same measure. It was unquestioned and nobody had any reason to think otherwise.

It is only in the past three or four years that there has been any real challenge to that practice and we found the need to submit a product to Revenue to get a VAT ruling on it because Revenue started throwing up question marks about this. I will pass this question over to Mr. Hurley, who can give the Deputy even more definitive information in that regard. However, I can tell the Deputy that over the past 47 years, every retailer in the country always had the very simple approach that it was 0% VAT for a food supplement regardless of whether it was a Vitamin C, ginger or garlic capsule. That was the practice and all those thousands of businesses applied that rule without hesitation. Suddenly, Revenue is saying that these thousands of businesses have been out of step and only Revenue knew what should have happened. It is only Revenue that claimed at one point that the very tight definition of vitamin, mineral or fish oil deserved the 0% rating according to a strict reading of the regulation and that everything else should have had 23% VAT attached to it. That story was then contradicted by Revenue's own website because the website had numerous products such as royal jelly, ginseng and garlic openly rated at 0%. I have snapshots from the 2018 guidance from Revenue's website detailing a 0% rating on these products in accordance with their categorisation as a food because-----