Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

Conscious that this debate will adjourn at 2.20 p.m. I shall confine myself to the 21 minutes available to me rather than have a few minutes carryover. I shall begin by saying something positive. At least in the legislation the Minister has brought forward he has made a decision on something, and for that we should be grateful. Huge debate has surrounded this issue over a protracted period. That debate has centred around significant potential consequences in making changes that are proposed by the Minister in the legislation. The Minister has made his choice. He assured the House, as he did previously at the launch of the review of the report of the public consultation process undertaken by his Department and in the other House, that the societal damaging consequences predicted by many of the changes intended to be put in place will not come to pass. I am minded to refer to the hit television series, "Yes, Minister". When Ministers found themselves in that position, the senior civil servant would say, "courageous". The Minister has taken a grave responsibility upon himself and, as Deputy Hogan and those of us who have watched this for two years have said, without any great evidence to back up the assertions and the confidence he has presented. Only time will judge and the Minister will have moved on to other things by then, perhaps even to greater things. One way or another, society will live with the consequences of this decision, narrow and all in its encompass, but potentially of major impact in societal terms in the way the grocery trade is delivered to the people in future.

The Restrictive Practices (Groceries) Order 1987 was put in place and maintained for the past 18 years through successive Governments. It was brought in 18 years ago, not by a reckless Minister but by a very well respected one and a former Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, for a purpose. It was not mindless, so before we change it we must have a compelling case.

It would be wise to examine in a dispassionate way how the order has impacted on prices over the past 18 years. The Minister is very anxious, both in his contribution here and elsewhere, to be restrictive enough in his focus to deal with the issue of prices, although the consultation paper does deal with other issues. It is interesting that the position of the Competition Authority, both in its public manifestations and in its presentations to the joint Oireachtas committee, exclusively focused on the price issue. That seemed to be the compelling issue, that to have cheaper prices we had to do away with the groceries order. In a nutshell, that is the argument that came in a simplistic fashion from a number of quarters during the course of this debate.

For a moment let us park the other significant issues of access, transport, the ghost town argument and all the rest. We will come back to them. Let us deal on the basis that the Minister and the former chairman of the Competition Authority have put forward, the issue of prices. Figures have been thrown around like snuff at a wake. Some of the figures I have seen have been massaged.

To deal with the price issue, I am happy to rely in my presentation exclusively on the authoritative analysis provided to the Oireachtas joint committee by an organisation that is beyond reproach, the Central Statistics Office. It carried out the analysis of prices over the duration of the existence of the groceries order. The order was signed in June 1987 and came into effect in December 1987. The period from June 1987 to July 2005 was presented to the Oireachtas joint committee for analysis by the CSO, the authoritative, definitive and independent collector of data and statistics in the State.

It is very interesting to look precisely at the effect of the groceries order on the items covered by it in comparison with food, non-alcoholic beverages and alcohol consumed at home, which was the issue it was asked to consider. Eighteen years is a very long period of analysis and it should provide definitive results on the cost of a basket of groceries between items that are covered by the groceries order compared with items not covered by it.

Items covered by the groceries order were cheaper than items not covered by the groceries order for nine of the past 18 years. I see the officials are writing about this. I will give the figures for the individual years. For the other nine years, items covered by the groceries order increased by more than items not covered. For nine of the 18 years, items covered by the groceries order had a greater inflation rate than items not covered and for the other nine years they had a lower inflation rate. If one looks at the figures in detail, as I have done, from 1987 to 2003, the difference in the rate of increase was entirely negligible. They were comparable. The existence of the groceries order was neither here nor there in the rate of price inflation over all the years from the inception of the groceries order in 1987 to the year 2003.

In truth, something did happen after that. Let me give the figures. Items covered by the groceries order had increased in price by 50.9%, that is, from a base of 100 to 150.9. Items not covered by the groceries order had increased by 49.8%, that is, from a base of 100 to a base of 149.8. The measured impact presented by the Central Statistics Office between price increases over 16 of the 18 years, as between items covered by the groceries order and those not covered, was of the order of 1.1%. If this is such an extraordinarily uncompetitive barrier to cheaper prices how can the difference only be 1%?

That information comes from the independent figures presented to us. It is hardly a compelling case for us to take this particular area and look at it as a matter of urgent reform that would require us to launch the Competition Authority into a review and that would make us change the law and announce with fanfare that it would lead to cheaper prices and the devil and all else.

As Deputy Hogan pointed out, we are not as ambitious in the projections now as we were when the argument was still being formulated, for example, the 9% decrease predicted by the Consumer Strategy Group or the prediction by the Competition Authority that it would be worth between €500 and €1,000 per consumer. We are a little bit more circumspect than this. The Minister has made no predictions. If one makes no predictions one cannot be found out. He just knows in his heart like de Valera that it will be a good thing but he is not sure how good——

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