Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak on this important matter of the Consumer Rights Bill 2022.

At the outset, as I always say in situations like this, I have been a small retailer for many years and I try to always ensure that my customers are happy with the goods and services that I provide.

This Bill is important. While the existing legislation on consumer contracts offers consumers necessary protections, it is disjointed and deficient in a number of respects, including the rights and the remedies of consumers in respect of the quality and other aspects of goods purchased under contracts of sale. They are regulated by two separate and not always consistent sets of statutory provisions, namely, the Sale of Goods Act 1893 and the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act 1980, as well as the European Communities (Certain Aspects of the Sale of Goods and Associated Guarantees) Regulations 2003. While services now account for an increasingly large amount of consumer activity and expenditure, the statutory provisions on the supply of services comprise only four sections of the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act 1980, compared with the more than 60 sections in the Acts regulating the sale of goods. Moreover, they are silent on key issues such as the remedies for services that do not conform to the contract. When people are working hard and buying goods or services of any type, we want to ensure they are treated properly and fairly. We have seen many of the multinationals that have come into the country using unorthodox procedures and efforts to try to win over customers. I always use the following analogy because it is straightforward to understand and shows what large groups of people can do. A certain town - I will not even say what county it is in but it is in Ireland - had many service stations and a large multinational group came riding in on the big white horse to that town and opened up a massive service station. It significantly reduced the cost of fuel to such an extent that it made more sense to people who had fuel at home, even if they had a large number of trucks on the road, to go to that service station because it was selling it at a price that no one else could provide. One by one, the lovely small family service stations that were in that large town closed until eight of them were gone. There were three of them that they were not able to shake but they did get eight of them closed up. Their tanks under the ground had to be sucked out and filled with concrete, which is a regulation, and those service stations shut. As for this big conglomerate that had come in on its white horse, that had brought down the price and that was the new saviour to the consumer because it was selling very cheap, all of a sudden the price started to go up week by week. There was nothing that could be done about it because it had the monopoly on the town at that stage. Now that town is one of the most uncompetitive places in the country to buy fuel quite simply because the conglomerate closed down everyone else. That is what I would call blackguarding the system and messing with the consumers.

People and families work very hard. I was speaking before coming into this debate at a Committee on Budgetary Oversight meeting and I was talking a lot about mom's purse. I like talking about mom's purse because it is my way of understanding the economy. My attitude is if mom's purse is not right on a Friday evening, the world is very wrong in that household. No Minister for Finance and no person over in Europe can tell mom about her purse. Mom knows about her own purse and if it is not right, it is wrong.

When people must pay for goods, we want to ensure that the goods are proper. Deputy Nolan rightly spoke about technology, for instance, services online, and about technological services that are provided and that are no proper and right, and stated that people are paying a fixed monthly contract for a service that might not be up to what it should be. That is obviously wrong. Those consumers must be protected.

There was a significant increase in online shopping during the pandemic and that, of course, did a great deal of harm. We must ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of consumers and trying to keep the local shops going as well.

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