Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Fadhb ar bith. I would have been only too delighted to listen to Deputy Carthy continuing on far more eloquently than I would myself.

The CCPC is the primary enforcement body for competition law. My colleagues have spoken about the fact that we are late to the game in this. It is our absolute failing on white-collar crime. In the past many of us have spoken in this Chamber regarding transposing European law in respect of white-collar crime. Those who engage in that level of criminality, whether from an organised criminal point of view or from an organised industrial or corporate point of view, have certain advantages and it is a case of us having to play catch-up. As has been said previously, at the end of the day we need to adequately resource and investigate the areas where this needs to occur. It is all about accountability, transparency and delivering for the consumer. It is about dealing with the issues where people perceive or know them to be, when we are talking about cartels and the impacts that these have, whether it is insurance costs, the issues in the beef industry, or whatever else. There is no stopping and starting in respect of the difficulties we have and Deputy O’Reilly referred to the abject cost there is to us of this, as a State and as individual citizens.

ComReg has been mentioned. Once again we are a laggard in the transposition of European law. That European law is to provide ComReg with the ability to do the business that it needs to do in ensuring consumer protection. A request was made to the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment, of which I am a member, to forego pre-legislative scrutiny, PLS, but we decided against that to ensure that what we are going to do will give ComReg sufficient powers. We were definite in our decision but we also realised that even if we had waived PLS, the fact is we were still going to miss the deadline that the European Commission wanted. Again we have too many of these failings and we very much need to look at them.

Let us consider the issues that are being debated in this House over the past number of days. The cost-of-living crisis involves everything from the primary sins of multiple Governments on the rental and housing crisis, the cost of childcare, but also the energy crisis, where the Government has failed to do what it can in mitigating the pain that people are suffering. The fact is they are suffering because so much of this is a case of pain heaped upon pain. It is not so much about the carbon tax but it is the fact that the carbon tax is on top of all of the other taxes. We really need to set out a direction for them in getting through this crisis.

Beyond that, what we are doing, and should be ensuring that we are doing here, is putting a system in place that deals with white-collar crime on a similar level to the way we deal with other forms of crime, to the crime of the poor person out there who does not have the resources, lobby power or access to the people in this Chamber. We need to ensure that we do that and that we show everybody out there that what we are going to operate is a fair system that delivers for everybody.

I get it, where at times people say that we have to be very careful as we need to ensure that we keep business in the State and protect jobs. We all accept that but if we do not do our due diligence on white-collar crime and do not find out when wrongdoing is occurring and cartels are operating, we hurt the consumer, the citizen and the regular Joe and Josephine out there. It is just not good enough. I welcome this Bill, and nearly all the legislation I mentioned earlier to provide the State with the tools that are required, even if it is to deal on an international basis with criminality, corporate malfeasance and those actions that detrimentally impact our ability to operate a society that delivers for people. It is a very significant cost and the moneys we lose are the moneys that we then do not have to put into the healthcare system, deliver on climate change and deal with the cost-of-living crisis. This is not a victimless crime but these are pieces of work that we have to do.

We all know that if we are going to talk about the wider corporate landscape, we also have a failing still in dealing with collective bargaining. I have mentioned the case of National Pen and its non-unionised workforce a number of times over the past number of weeks. It is an international company that is failing miserably to give people the information they need on what their future holds and it has not yet put on the table a redundancy package. All we hear from Government and others is that this is going to be a generous package but the fact is that we do not have the legislation and the protections in place for people and these sort of problems will continue to happen until we do what needs to be done.

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