Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

To be fair to the Minister of State, I acknowledge that he arranged to organise this meeting last week, which is when he announced it. He brought forward the scheduled 21 June meeting of the retail forum to discuss this most pressing of issues. I congratulate the Minister of State on his appointment. It is the first opportunity I have had to do so in this Chamber. I have no doubt the Minister of State will enjoy the experience. He is working with good officials who put the interests of the country, jobs and enterprise first.

When I first raised this issue last month, the Government showed little or no interest in bringing the supermarkets to heel over the inflated prices customers were paying at the checkouts. Since I started to raise this issue consistently some time ago it has begun to snowball and suddenly it seems all sides of the House are coming around to my thinking and that of the Labour Party on this issue, namely, that we have to do something to tackle the elevated prices of basic grocery items. The supermarkets will have us believe this is some sort of zero-sum game where either the customer pays elevated prices or the primary producers take the hit. However, the truth is that these giant supermarkets and food corporations have plenty of room to manoeuvre on price and still return a more than healthy profit. We know that input costs are stabilising, and falling in many cases, but customers are simply not seeing the benefits they ought to see. The heat applied to the supermarkets on this pressing issue in recent weeks, thanks to the Labour Party’s focus on the issue, has resulted in some action, albeit superficial action, with price reductions on milk and butter, as the Minister of State acknowledged. I fear, however, this is nothing more than an exercise in public relations, attempting to show the public, regulators and Government that the sector can somehow regulate itself but we know this is not the case and the evidence is in our weekly shopping trolleys and baskets.

There is an issue with the lack of price transparency in the goods sitting on our supermarket shelves and that is at the root of the problem consumers are experiencing. For a month I have been consistently calling on the CCPC to initiate an investigation into possible price gouging in the sector. This is not a left-wing conspiracy theory and something we have dreamed up. We can read the data and the research and we understand what the European Central Bank, ECB, is saying, for example. The ECB has made it very clear and it has pointed to excess profit-making in corporations across the European Union as a significant factor in food inflation, which continues to grow at a multiple of the overall baseline inflation rate. When I first raised this issue on the floor of this House with the Taoiseach, he simply tried to bat away the question, expressing his confidence that inflation will fall and that this would, sooner or later, be reflected in reduced prices on the supermarket shelves. As the issue gained traction, there has been a marked change in attitude on the Government benches and I suppose that comes better late than never.

I acknowledge the Minister of State's personal interest in this issue and his public pronouncements in recent days. I have been telling the Government this for a month and it has at last admitted there are weapons at its disposal to tackle elevated grocery prices. We will see what happens this week when the Minister of State meets the retail forum. I hope he will go further than a simple plea to the multiples to bring down their prices. I am grateful the Minister of State acknowledged my function in establishing the retail forum, an important organisation that represents the interests of the most significant private sector employer in this country. About 300,000 plus people are employed in retail but let us not overstate either the significance of what the retail forum can do. We know the retail forum is a consultative forum and is not established on a statutory basis. There are good people involved from academia, industry and other interests and I am happy to back the Minister of State's initiative but we need to see delivery on what is discussed tomorrow. We also need to see timelines for ensuring that as the input costs are reducing we see changes in what consumers are being charged for the things we all depend on.

We need to see something along the lines of what the Greek Government has done in sitting down with the retailers and food industry and agreeing, for example, maximum prices on more than 50 staple items in the weekly shopping basket. My understanding is that the Greek Administration did that late last year. This should happen in concert with an investigation by the CCPC into possible price gouging in the food and grocery sector.

Despite there being a string of regulators in this country, prices are not regulated. This is the case not only in the food and grocery sector but also in the context of energy, telecommunications and mortgages, which could all do with a bit more than the light-touch regulation we see across the economy. We have plenty of regulators in theory, but they have limited capacity and mandate. We do not see a lot of enforced regulation. It is time these consumer watchdogs were given the teeth to bite instead of just barking and whining and hoping industry will come to heel.

Since it is our highlighting of this issue over the past month that has led to the Sinn Féin proposal in this motion, we in the Labour Party of course have no difficulty supporting it. I am glad the Government will not oppose it. We are told constantly that competition is a good thing. I agree. Competition in markets is a good thing. Competition in marketplaces usually manages to bring costs for consumers down. That is what we are always taught. That is the theory, but the practice and the outcome are often not what we expect. Competition is a good thing once it works for the benefit of the ordinary punter, but the big players cannot simply have it all their own way. When markets are abused and customers are exploited, the State and regulation need to step in. I am pleased to see the Government, albeit late in the day, responding to our pleas to focus on this quite literal bread-and-butter issue, but I hope it will go further in delivering a real and lasting solution on this issue until the food industry and the supermarket retailers can demonstrate that they are capable of setting fair and sustainable prices for their products.

As has been stated previously, and as the Ministers of State will acknowledge, this is an issue that disproportionately impacts the less well-off, who, of course, spend a far greater proportion of their income on basic groceries. In a week when the Government is scratching its head wondering what to do with all the excess revenue at its disposal, we cannot countenance that there are working families out there struggling to put food on the table. I point the Ministers of State to yesterday's Social Justice Ireland analysis, which illustrates the extent of the problem and the disparities and gross inequalities we are experiencing in this country. Some 677,000 of our people are living - in Ireland, in 2023, when we are talking about record budgetary surpluses - below the poverty line. I hope the Ministers of State will agree that this is unconscionable. It is immoral, it is unfair, it is wrong and it needs to be put right.

The multinational food producers and the joint supermarket multiples, as I said, have been having it all their own way for far too long. They made a fortune during the pandemic and are seeking to maintain those artificially high prices and profits in a post-pandemic world off the backs of hard-pressed customers. The working people of Ireland - and indeed primary producers - cannot be made to foot the bill for the greed of these giant corporations any longer. It is now up to the Government to use the tools it has at its disposal, tools that the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, acknowledges, rather belatedly, the Government has to address this situation for once and for all. I note what he said about price controls. Generally speaking, I would be one of the last people to reach for the weapon of price controls. As I said earlier, however, when competition fails and when the market is abused by big players in it, regulation and the enforcement of the regulation that is there need to be used in the interests of consumers. Maximum price orders were legislated for in 2007 by a Government in which the Minister of State, Deputy Callery, served. There is an acknowledgment that in the future markets could potentially be abused and prices may need to be controlled under what the legislation terms "abnormal circumstances". We are living in abnormal circumstances at the moment. There are a number of ways in which the Government can deal with this. For example, it could, as some other governments across the European Union are considering, slap windfall taxes not just on energy companies, which are posting hyper-profits under abnormal circumstances, but on major retailers as well. That has been considered and proposed by the trade union movement across the European Union.

I will conclude by asking the Ministers of State to do the following. They should ask the supermarkets themselves tomorrow to stop guarding their profits like the third secret of Fátima and publish their profits so people can make up their own mind. The Government can request the CCPC to undertake a market analysis of the supermarket sector in Ireland, and I ask it again to do so. I would say to the Government as well to keep in its back pocket the threat of maximum price orders until supermarkets come to heel and do the right thing by consumers who shop with them.

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