Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

The Senator is quite right; it is not a national market. People cannot buy their fuel online and have it delivered. As he rightly said, people buy it when they need it and they need to buy it locally. We have looked at these markets in the context of mergers. This is where we have a mandate to preserve the amount of choice people have. As I mentioned, when we have looked at this, we have used a radius of 2 miles or 3.2 km in urban areas and 5 miles or 8 km in rural areas as the distance people might travel. When we have done competition assessments, we have looked at the amount of choice that exists within those quite small radii. Where we have seen that in a particular area the amount of choice might be reduced by a merger to a level that we think is against the interest of consumers, we have required that the particular petrol stations be divested as a condition of allowing that merger to continue.

I completely agree with the Senator that a petrol station in Donegal does not compete with one in Dublin. Where the choices are limited by the geographical area, we do not have a mandate to increase choice, but we have a mandate to prevent choice being substantially reduced when a merger takes place. That is something we have done. If we are asked to consider future mergers, we will continue to do that.