Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1:

After "compare prices and make informed choices" to insert:

"calls on the Government to:

— commit to passing the Competition and Consumer Protection (Unfair Prices) Bill 2023; and

— instead of using over €700 million to cut the rate of Value Added Tax on hospitality in Budget 2026, to use these hundreds of millions to reduce child poverty with a targeted second tier of child benefit, and other measures to provide income supports to households.".

I thank the Social Democrats for moving this motion. My amendment is designed to do two things. First, Government ought to allow for Labour's Competition and Consumer Protection (Unfair Prices) Bill 2023 to pass. That Bill was published in 2023 and debated on Second Stage in the House in late May. Frankly, there were fewer Members in attendance at the debate then than there are here this morning. Second, the amendment proposes that instead of using over €700 million to cut the rate of VAT on hospitality in budget 2026, the Government should use these hundreds of millions of euro to reduce child poverty with a targeted second tier of child benefit and other measures to provide income supports to households. There are the choices this House will have to make over the next couple of months - a hand up to children to give them every chance of a good life or a handout to Supermac's and McDonald's.

I will not rehearse the figures on how the price of basic staples we all need have risen week on week over the past three years. They are on the record. The early price rises of groceries on the shelves at the start of this cost-of-living crisis were quite easily explained by post-Covid demand followed by war in Europe. We all understood and continue to understand that. However, what is not sufficiently clear is why the price of products we need and take for granted are still rising endlessly while input costs are under control. Some of them have plateaued and come down but big businesses in the supermarket sector continue to post exceptional profits. This is the point. If it walks, talks and acts like price gouging at the check out, it may very well be.

The question is: what does the Legislature do about it? I provided one solution. It is contained in the Bill I referred to. We should make the huge multinational supermarkets operating here publish their profits. The Bill was published in May 2023 and debated on Second Stage in late May of this year. Its core idea and some of the text are essentially referenced in this very welcome motion from the Social Democrats but the Government has delayed its advancement to Committee Stage by a year. The question is why the Government decided to do that when in May 2023, in response to Labour's campaigning on high grocery prices, the then Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Simon Coveney, said he would do just that. He is on record as saying that this is a good idea but the Government has done nothing since. He said that if price rises continued, he would haul the supermarkets in, bring them to heel and enact his own legislation to make them publish their profits in Ireland and give the CCPC more market surveillance and enforcement powers.

I heard the Minister of State, Deputy Dillon, on the "News at One" on RTÉ Radio last Friday. He said all the right things. He is well briefed. He also said that what we need now is the evidence to take the appropriate action and that process is under way. What process is under way? None, I would venture. Like Ministers, I like to make my decisions based on evidence. The Minister of State said that he would ask the CCPC to do a rerun of the analysis it did on grocery prices in mid-2023 - the one that managed to conclude somehow that there was no evidence of price gouging and excessive pricing in Ireland even though it could not possibly make a conclusive determination on that because it had no information of any quality on the very profits the companies it was supposed to be examining were making. Riddle me that. This is the "Father Ted" approach to the cost-of-living crisis in Ireland. It is the equivalent of "Can anything be said for another mass? Let's do another report." It is a fool's errand. Without clear information and without compelling the supermarkets to publish their profits, we will have no reliable data. Because we do not know their margins, we will not know how they price products and hard-pressed punters will continue to be kept in the dark - just how the big chains want it and all sustained by a Government that will not rock the boat in a situation where there is also a real risk that the very limited competition in the supermarket sector in Ireland could lead to abuses of dominant positions with both the business environment and consumers ending up paying the price.

The proposals I made in our Bill are modest. The proposals in the Social Democrats' motion are modest. They are realistic, reasonable and pragmatic. I would not for a minute overstate what its provisions would achieve but it would bring greater transparency. It would help us to stand up for the customer once and for all and help make major businesses in this country more accountable. It baffles me why any Government is hostile to that.

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