Ms Isolde Goggin:

I have a number of points to make. There is quite an amount of ground being covered. On the point about below-cost selling, the current regulations, because they require the retailer to have a contract with the producer and the terms and conditions are written down, it will be illegal for them to subsequently go back and say they are selling something below cost and want the producer to take the hit on it. Once the thing is in the contract and it has been agreed it would not be allowed. As to whether retailers should not be allowed to do it at all, this is where we are coming at it from different angles. We are coming at it from the point of view of consumers. Of course cheap fruit and vegetables are good for consumers. How could we say otherwise? With regard to the notion that they pay on other products, we must compare how people do their grocery shopping now compared with how they used to do it ten years ago before the crash. There used to be a situation in which people did one big shop in one place. They did one big weekly shop and bought a few bits like bread and milk in between. What we see now is people spreading it around three or four different shops for the one weekly or fortnightly shop. People go to the German discounters for certain things but they do not have all the brands so people go to another place. People are very well able to pick up on good bargains in one shop and not buy everything there so they do not get penalised on other goods in the same shop.

The CCPC's big concern about a ban on below-cost selling is it means that, if the wholesaler or distributor raises the price, every retailer across the board raises the price. Competition in the retail sector is lost and that is detrimental to consumers.

Mr. Murphy will speak about the preferred enforcement model, but the CCPC has not seen evidence of retailers pushing back on suppliers where they are offering cheap products themselves.