Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome our guests. I am familiar with both of their operations, so I know that they put in a good shift on behalf of the consumer, for which I thank them.

In respect of this Bill, Ireland suffers from having a small number of big players in many sectors. As, increasingly, these become data smart players, they have new sources of power to abuse dominance, to use the term that is used in competition law. With these new civil powers, will there be an opportunity for either or both of the agencies to develop codes of practice that might set a standard for activities across a range of behaviours that influence competition? That might help us to get a better handle on this abusive dominance often which can be a little hidden and, I suspect, hard to prosecute and certainly under criminal sanction. Do we see new codes of practice or standards being promulgated by the agencies, on the back of these changed powers?

Ms Goggin said, a bit intriguingly, that the devil is in the detail in terms of how this is transposed into Irish law. What exactly are we supposed to be looking out for to make sure that the transposition is adequate?

More generally, we have, I suspect, somewhat weak consumer protections. Certainly in the telco area there have been many grounds for criticism. Some of the codes of practices do not seem to have been adequately enforced, and there is much complaint about a slow response from big players and difficulties in getting responses.

As we move to the civil standard again can we expect an uplift in consumer protection? Are there ways in which we can ensure this legislation has positive spillover effects into the consumer protection environment, apart from the strictly enforceable dimensions of the commission's work?