Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

I thank the Deputy for his question. I apologise for not being able to give too much insight into the detail of the inquiries and the assessments we are making at the moment. We have had allegations of collusion and we are assessing all of those and gathering information to help us with the assessment. We would be very interested to hear from the Deputy’s constituents and the people who have been in touch with him. If they think there has been behaviour in the industry that is a breach of competition law, we would encourage them to come forward and give us the information that we can then use as part of our assessment process.

I can talk about prior engagements. As for our prior engagement with the industry, there have been quite a few mergers in the industry so we have a role when there are mergers in any industry to assess whether the merger is likely to cause a substantial lessening of competition and to either block the merger or get it restructured. There was a merger about seven years ago involving the terminal operators at Dublin and filling stations. One of the things the CCPC did at that point was impose some conditions to make sure that there was not a reduction in competition at the Dublin Port terminal operations and to make sure that in certain local areas where it might have led to a reduction in the number in competition among neighbouring filling stations, to insist on some divestment of filling stations to preserve that competition. In this way we have been involved with the industry.

There have been subsequent mergers as well that we looked at. We have been involved in some of those issues in industry in the past. We have taken action to preserve the level of competition.