Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

Perhaps I may continue as I have less time than my two colleagues because of the way the order of the House falls.

To be fair, I wish to address another issue. I refer to the past two years, in case the Minister asks about them. There has been a difference between prices of items covered by the groceries order and those not covered by it in the years 2004 and 2005. After 16 years of no change, a very significant gap in the figures of 9.7% opened in the past two years. Something extraordinary happened. The items covered by the order did not shoot up in price. They only increased by 1% in the period presented to the Oireachtas joint committee, that is, from 150.9 in 2003 to 151.9 in July 2005. What did happen is that the non-grocery items fell during that period by 7.6% from 149.3 in 2003 to 142.2.

Since those figures were presented, I have been trying to understand why the items not covered by the groceries order declined in price by 7.6% in that period. I decided to ask the expert in these matters, the chairman of the Competition Authority, when he came before the Oireachtas committee but he was not sure. He did not know. What he predicted was that it was probably because of the arrival in the market of Aldi and Lidl in that period. The great irony is that the evidence they gave to the committee is that, because of predatory pricing, they could not have opened in Ireland had it not been for the groceries order. They present a relatively narrow range of goods and said they would have been devoured and killed off by Tesco and Dunnes Stores in proximity.

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