Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

I will be sharing time with my colleague Deputy Bacik. I am pleased to speak on the Competition and Consumer Protection (Unfair Prices) Bill 2023. When I introduced this legislation on First Stage two years ago, the rate of inflation was at levels not seen in decades. A confluence of grim circumstances, some of which were the consequence of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, saw the price of basic staples, such as bread, eggs, butter, pasta and so on, rise in price by close to 20% in some cases over a short period. Allied with post-pandemic supply chain problems, rising energy , transport and labour costs saw input costs more generally climb significantly. Pretty much all of those costs were passed on to hard-pressed customers doing their weekly shop.

There was also a clear suspicion, as we will recall, and not without foundation, that multinational corporations, including the big supermarket multiples around whose stores we push our trolleys each week, were using the cover provided by the energy cost crisis to push prices up even further, engaging in profiteering and, in some cases, posting inexplicably high super-normal profits. Indeed, in 2023, that radical left-wing hotbed, the European Central Bank, ECB, warned that large corporations were using the energy crisis to boost their margins. In 2023, the chief economist of the ECB, Mr. Philip Lane, warned that companies across Europe were using what became a gradual fall in input costs to boost their profits, perhaps keeping the prices of goods and services artificially high for longer than the market could justify instead of passing on lower prices to consumers.

This form of profit taking at the expense of consumers has an apt term of its own, namely, greedflation.

Professor Lane, who is a former Governor of the Irish Central Bank and, indeed, who worked in Trinity College, said the easing of some supply chain bottlenecks had not made its way into retail prices. This was despite producer prices decreasing strongly in the last while. He said this had enabled some firms to increase their profit margins. Two years on from the start of the cost-of-living crisis, the price of the every day goods on which we all rely and the services on which we depend are still high. Input costs have come down, stabilised or plateaued. The pace of underlying inflation has slowed but the cost of the weekly shop in the last 12 months has shot up by 5%. Wage growth this year is expected to average 3.66% so the hard-earned euro in your pocket is expected to stretch ever further.

The UCC economist, Oliver Browne, writing on the RTÉ website recently, said he holds out little prospect of grocery prices falling anytime soon. He said that "while some global pressures may ease, others, such as climate change, labour costs, and geopolitical uncertainty, are likely to persist." He further said that "global volatility means that significant price drops were unlikely in the short term." That is an interesting prediction for a number of different reasons. With elevated grocery prices now sticky, my fear, and the fear of my Labour Party colleagues, is that the threat of a tariff war between the European Union and the US, and the disruption that would create in global trade, while having a real impact on the cost of doing business, will end up giving some large, dominant corporations carte blanche to usher in a new wave of price hikes at the supermarket and lay the blame at the door of tariffs. It was energy costs a couple of years ago; it is now tariffs sneaked in under the cover of circumstances that are beyond most people's control. A repeat of what we saw in 2023 is likely to be on the cards and we are still living with the very real consequences of that period for working families across this country.

The cost-of-living crisis has not gone. It was elevated in 2023 but there is a permanent cost-of-living crisis across this country, especially for those who are on low, middle and fixed incomes. Of course, high grocery prices affect those on low and fixed incomes most adversely. The answer from Government during the early days of the cost-of-living crisis - note that I say "early days" because we are still in a cost-of-living crisis - was to bring in a series of much-trumpeted one off payments, some of which were famously untargeted and universal in nature. It then slavishly repeated that over and over again for longer than was capable of being justified.

Throwing money at a problem is not always the solution. The one thing Government parties repeatedly seem to be ideologically incapable of doing is to make regulatory interventions to bring major corporations to heel - normal kinds of interventions you would see in a regulated market economy, even if there are arguments that might suggest the potential for the abuse of dominant positions in market places, especially where weak or limited competition is not working in the best interest of the consumer. This is where competition and consumer protection law aligns. We are not good at protecting the interests of the consumer in this country. All of the evidence over the years has shown that. Competition and consumer protection law are intertwined. You cannot have one without the other.

In short, the question of potential abuse of dominant positions in marketplaces is actually at the heart of what this Bill seeks to address. Two years on from the height of the grocery price inflation spike, the cost of the basics is still extremely high. To give some examples, we have noticed ourselves from our weekly shopping that the price of a 1 Ib of butter is on average €4.69 at the moment. That is a 26% rise in a year, according to the Central Statistics Office. Kantar, the grocery price consultancy well known across the world, said price inflation in supermarkets is double what it was last year. What is the practical effect of this? All of this means a typical family will need to earn an extra €4,000 before tax to merely stand still when it comes to the price of a weekly shop.

Two years on the from the initiation of this Bill, the case for its enactment and for more tools to be made available to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, is still strong. We know that pricing structures in the grocery trade are complex. We understand that. The retail trade is complex. It is hard to definitively rule out the possibility of price gouging among major retailers - keeping prices high for so long with a slow rate of decline. In response to the Labour Party's advocacy and campaigning two years ago on the impact of high grocery prices on Irish consumers, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission decided, at the request of the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, to initiative a form of a desktop analysis on grocery prices in this country. Insofar as it could, it sought to address the question of potential price gouging in supermarkets.

I welcomed that assessment, which it published around this time two years ago. It made some very peculiar affirmations, though, that I dispute. I dispute them for a couple of reasons. Principally, it said that no evidence of price gouging of customers by large multiples was evident in the Irish market. I posed this question to it then and I repeat it now: how can you definitively rule this out when nobody - no agency and the public more generally - has any access whatsoever to reliable information on profit margins and profits more generally in the Irish grocery trade and supermarket sector? At best, I thought it was unwise for the CCPC to make that claim without the information it needed to make a definitive judgment.

This Bill seeks to bring greater transparency to the structure of the large supermarket businesses in Ireland and the sector more generally and to end the secrecy on pricing and profit margins. It is in the interest of consumers and competition. When we published this Bill two years ago, the then Minister for enterprise, Simon Coveney, said he would take steps that would lead to big supermarket players publishing their profits and being compelled to make the prices they charge their customers clearer. Since 2023, that Government and its new iteration has taken a vow of silence on this issue. There is nothing in the programme for Government that commits to an initiative like this. Nothing has happened. This Bill would amend the Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014 and address this fundamental problem while arming the regulator with real enforcement powers to bring giant retailers to heel and ensure more transparency and fair pricing at the checkout. It would allow the CCPC to undertake a deep study and analysis of the costs large retailers incur, the profits they take and the prices they set, giving us a much clearer insight into how supermarkets in this country operate and what their pricing structures are. It would bring the kind of transparency to this market that has been sorely missed for far too long.

I hope we can make progress on bringing this legislation to Committee Stage for further interrogation. I understand that on Tuesday, Cabinet decided not to oppose this legislation. That is a good thing but I believe, especially given the fact we are entering into a very uncertain period with potential tariffs and so on, it is really important that the CCPC is empowered to stand up for consumers. We should use this legislation to empower it to do just that and to make our supermarkets honest.

Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)
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I commend my colleague, Deputy Ged Nash, on bringing forward this important Bill. We are all aware of the spike in the cost of living. In four years, the cost of a basket of groceries has risen by more than 35%. This is having a huge impact on families and households. Organisations like Barnardos report that parents are forgoing medicines to put food on their children's plates. We are noticing shrinkflation - the charging of the same prices but with less product. Households across Ireland are having to cope with this cost-of-living crisis - a spike in the cost of living that is affecting every household, individual, family and community.

Almost one third of households comprising an adult and children under 18 went into debt to meet ordinary living expenses last year and one fifth of households struggled to make ends meet.

The costs of fuel, rent, housing, food, childcare and basic services are rising. Deputy Nash gave some examples. Another example is coffee. Coffee is now 200% more expensive than it was when I was first elected a TD in 2021. They say that trends come back into fashion and those prices would have us all drinking chicory again. In seriousness, milk has gone up by more than 25% since 2022. A bar of chocolate from Cadbury has doubled in price. A basket of 25 items that would have cost us €87 three years ago now costs €115.93, and spread over the course of the year, the cost of this basket, if bought weekly, comes in at just over €6,000 compared to an annual cost of €4,500 in 2022. These are shocking increases, and all of us are hearing daily from constituents who are feeling this squeeze and whose incomes are no longer enough to meet the rising cost of living they face.

We in the Labour Party believe that Ireland needs a pay rise and we need to start with those on the minimum wage by transforming it into a living wage. We are going to be pressing the Government on that. We also need to tackle this issue at the consumer protection level. We want to stop the shameless price gouging, and I have to say that Deputy Ged Nash has mounted a really strong and powerful campaign against price gouging. We might call it a crusade to protect consumers. That is really important, and this Bill is an important part of that campaign.

This is not unique to Ireland and we note that elsewhere, the cost of groceries has also been a huge political issue. In Sweden, Bulgaria and other countries in Europe, there have been mass boycotts of grocery chains that are engaged in price gouging. It is an interesting idea but we in the Labour Party are proposing a rather different solution today through legislative means. Deputy Nash's Bill, the Competition and Consumer Protection (Unfair Prices) Bill, would give the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission greater powers to analyse and survey the groceries market and to look at the pricing practices of the major multiples. Critically, the Bill would compel companies to share with the Commission the data on their profit margins. This information has to be made available to consumers. The public deserves to know who is profiting from the cost-of-living crisis.

I might add that all of us are increasingly aware of a practice we are seeing across many different multiples that are asking consumers to hand over precious data in exchange for slightly lower prices on goods. I refer to the sorts of clubcard schemes we are seeing. The irony is that major chains are looking for data from consumers and yet are not providing the State, the CCPC or any of us with crucial data on their own profits they are making off the backs of consumers. We need to see a flow of information two ways, and that is really the kernel of Deputy Nash's Bill. It seeks to ensure we will have greater transparency and information available to us as consumers and to the public. It will also empower not only consumers but also the CCPC. It has been said too many times that the CCPC is a toothless organisation. We need to arm the CCPC with the authority to bring transparency to grocery pricing.

When we talk about consumers and the protection of consumers, we are talking about families, renters, parents trying to put food on the table for children, and older people trying to make their pensions stretch. We have to do something about "greedflation", as Deputy Nash says. I am glad, as Deputy Nash is, that the Government is not opposing this Bill on Second Stage but what we actually want to see is the Government seeing this Bill pass into law.

I mentioned the boycotts under way in much of Europe. In Montenegro, consumer retail boycotts are actually supported by the Government there. In Croatia, the Government has adopted a position of tactical non-opposition. We are not asking the Minister of State to take that sort of drastic action; we are merely asking him to support the passage of this Bill into law, and to support consumer protection and empowerment.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I thank the Labour Party and Deputies Nash and Bacik for bringing forward this Bill. Before I was ever a politician, competition law was my thing when I qualified as a solicitor so I am very interested in it and generally support what the Deputies are trying to do. The Government is not opposing this.

The purpose of the Bill is to confer additional powers on the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to help in identifying and countering unfair pricing that amounts to abuse of dominance. It is important to remember - I think the Deputies do - that abuse of dominance is a criminal offence. I do not think there is enough discussion of that and I do not hear that from some of the authorities. People always need to be reminded that you can go to jail for competition law breaches.

The objectives of the Bill are in line with the Government's policy of increasing transparency, clarity and fairness for consumers. There are points the Minister thinks warrant consideration. A significant amount of legislation has been introduced in recent years that has increased consumer protections when it comes to purchasing goods and services. Competition law has been introduced that supports a fairer marketplace, tackles anti-competitive practices and enhances the enforcement powers of the CCPC. I have to say, we should never have merged the two functions.

Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour)
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Yes.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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I think they are totally separate functions but we are all responsible for that. We may have proposed it, and it may have happened then after 2011. I cannot quite remember but consumer protection law is one thing. Competition law, of course, is related to it but they are very different roles. I would love to hear more on the competition law side, to be honest.

The mandate of the CCPC has been extended, to be fair. It has more powers, and the 2022 Act was groundbreaking. Breaches of competition law can now be enforced through administrative actions taken by competition authorities, and the fines are significant - €10 million or 10% of turnover. The Consumer Rights Act 2022 makes consumer contract law simpler to understand and navigate, strengthens consumer protections and provides businesses with clearer rules on their obligations towards consumers. The EU General Product Safety Regulations, which came into force in December 2024, modernise the product safety framework and address the new challenges posed to product safety by the digitalisation of our economies.

The CCPC has also got a range of other functions in other various pieces of EU legislation as well, and it has taken prosecutions against retailers in 2024 and 2025 under price indications regulations, which is a slightly different thing, and for breaking sales pricing legislation. I also see from its website that there have been a number of raids etc. with regard to the competition law side as well.

The resources for the CCPC have gone up significantly, by 90% since 2020. Its headcount has grown, and as part of the development of the action plan on competitiveness and productivity, this Government has given a commitment that competition and consumer protection enforcement will be strengthened. The Department of enterprise is committed to further strengthening the CCPC’s capacity to deliver in line with these commitments and is actively developing a related miscellaneous Bill to achieve this. Part of this will include changes in the law to give the CCPC the power to impose large fines for serious breaches of consumer law, for example to allow the CCPC to issue fines that are a percentage of turnover. In addition, the Department is also examining the potential to give the CCPC powers to collect, organise and study public procurement data to find and prevent bid-rigging cartels, and I think that is a really important proposal.

While welcoming the general tenor of the Bill, it is essential that any proposed legislative or regulatory changes are informed by robust evidence and will achieve the objective of the Bill in a focused way and not give rise to unintended consequences. The Bill will, of course, require extensive scrutiny from a policy, legal and financial perspective to ensure the benefits outweigh the risks.

The CCPC already has many powers. It can investigate anticompetitive practices, including the abuse of dominance; conduct market studies and enforcement actions; appoint authorised officers with powers to enter premises, seize documents and compel information, and we have seen recent examples of that; co-operate with other national and international bodies; and bring civil or criminal proceedings for breaches of competition law. The Act does not explicitly empower the CCPC to focus on unfair pricing as a stand-alone issue, conduct profit margin analyses or cost-based pricing studies, or require the publication of such studies with a consumer welfare priority.

The Department believes the Bill would benefit from additional legal analysis. The Minister goes on to talk about some other issues in the Bill that could be considered. I will leave them on the record but they would be factors that would come into a scrutiny process for the Bill. One thing the Department says is that the Bill applies to all undertakings, from sole-trading farmers to large FDI companies, and that would represent a signal change in policy. What constitutes an excessive profit or margin is very subjective. There is no law preventing businesses from making excessive profits nor is there any law preventing a business from being in a dominant position. We do not have the monopolisation laws they have in America; we have laws relating to abuse of a dominant position.

The Bill proposes to give the CCPC powers to undertake studies, analyses or surveys and to request information from undertakings when investigating potential breaches of section 5 of the Competition Act, as amended. The CCPC’s existing powers contained in the Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2014 are sufficient, the Department says, for the purpose of analysing markets and for requesting information from undertakings to investigate potential breaches of competition law. To this end, it should be noted that the CCPC has recently employed its powers to request information in a number of investigations.

The Department believes that the focus on unfair pricing as a stand-alone issue is not necessary because the CCPC can already investigate the issue of unfair pricing.

We do not believe this needs to be explicitly called out in the Bill as it is already covered by what the CCPC can investigate. On conducting profit margin analysis and cost-based pricing studies, the CCPC may not currently have the knowledge and expertise to run these studies. Any expansion of knowledge and expertise to include such studies would require additional staffing and resources.

In regard to the publication of such studies with consumer welfare as a priority, it should be highlighted that all studies the CCPC produces and publishes intend to benefit consumer welfare already, so I believe this does not need to be explicitly called out in the Bill. In addition, the CCPC is responsible for consumer protection and enforcement of legislation in that sphere.

The Bill's enforcement mechanisms, such as the power to require information and conduct investigations, may place a significant administrative burden, and this burden could be particularly challenging for smaller retailers, in particular, with limited resources. As currently drafted, the Bill makes no distinction regarding the size of businesses. The Government and the EU have commitments to simplification and reduction of administrative burdens on our businesses. I reiterate that competition law is there to protect consumers as well and to ensure businesses can succeed. Businesses can lose out as well if one business is using its dominant position or engaging in price fixing.

The Bill introduces criminal penalties and we believe the introduction of criminal penalties would need further scrutiny. As it stands, the Bill is also contradictory on the proposed new powers for the CCPC in that it requires it to have due regard for commercial confidentiality when publishing studies, analyses or surveys, but the interests and welfare of consumers are stated as the paramount consideration. Balancing these two could be challenging.

We will not be opposing this Bill, so when progressing to the next Stage, these areas will need to be examined to ensure no duplication or overlapping of work and that the additional powers conferred on the CCPC are proportionate and benefit both consumers and business.

Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein)
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I thank Deputy Nash for bringing this Bill forward again. Sinn Féin supports the Bill going through Second Stage. The Bill seeks to amend the Competition and Consumer Protection Act. There is no requirement in Irish law that a business should charge only reasonable prices for goods and services or should achieve no more than a reasonable profit. There is an exception, however, in EU law and in the Irish consumer Act 2002 and this legislation seeks to prohibit the abuse of a dominant position by some businesses.

While it is not unlawful to have a dominant position, it is unlawful to abuse that dominant position. I welcome that the Bill seeks to bring greater transparency to the structure of large supermarket businesses in Ireland and to the sector more generally to end the secrecy around pricing structures in retail businesses. As we know, many people are absolutely puzzled as to how there have been such large price increases. Sometimes, when the price of oil increases, that is used as a rationale for this, but if the price of oil goes down, the prices never go down. When a war happens, such as in Ukraine, prices go up but they never go down. There are circumstances that need to be investigated.

It is important to also allow the CCPC to undertake a study and analysis of the costs large retailers incur, the profits they take and the prices they set - in other words, the cost to a retailer of supplying the goods or services concerned to consumers and the size of the business's profit margin. It is essential the CCPC would be allowed to collect any data it needed to complete this analysis and publish the results, and this Bill would allow that to happen. Knowledge and information are key to making the right decisions for consumers.

Sinn Féin supports the passage of the Bill through Second Stage and will potentially put forward amendments on Committee Stage. I know the Minister of State has already alluded to some of the questions, such as what would be the definition of a dominant market position or a dominant company and who makes a determination that a company is occupying a dominant position. Also, the provision of services is less easy to quantify than goods. How will businesses demonstrate the cost of services?

This Bill is brought forward in an environment of ever-increasing costs for people, with ever-increasing food and energy bills and other costs. At every door you go to and with every person you talk to, there is reference to the cost of living. It has not gone away. It is a very serious issue for people day in and day out who are trying to make ends meet. Ordinary workers and families are facing ever-rising prices, as evidenced by the recent publication of the consumer price index in April. Any measure that seeks to ethically address rising prices should be welcomed. I hope this Bill will contribute to a greater sense of fairness and transparency for consumers. It is very important consumers are able to see the profits companies are generating and compare them to the cost of making that item or producing that service. Only with openness, fairness and transparency can consumers make a better informed decision about the purchases they make.

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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As much as anybody, I appreciate the need for really strong competition law, policy and legislation. The Deputy brought me back to my college days when he spoke about defining the market because that was one of the big questions we got in the exam every year. It is also one of the big challenges the competition authority has.

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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Was it during one of Ivana's lectures?

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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No, she was on the criminal law side, although it is criminal law - it is as simple as that - because you can be jailed or fined and the EU has very significant powers as well for bigger businesses. We all want to see, because if prices go up, and I know tariffs were mentioned being used as an excuse and all of that and some of these are issues, but the reality is, as Deputy Donnelly said, that prices go up but we never see them come down, except in certain products. When it is an input into a product, it is always difficult to see how the price will come down. That is one of the reasons we must stand firm on tariffs because there is no question that they will lead to price increases all through society. The Deputy is right that we will never see prices come down again, so we must really work hard on tariffs, energy prices and changing our energy sources to make sure we have a more robust system.

Deputy Bacik mentioned the price of coffee, and it has risen. I looked at the market prices of coffee from South America or Africa and it has risen fivefold in recent years. There have been major price increases globally for various reasons and that can include supply chain issues. The Houthis in Yemen have a direct impact on consumer prices. Oil prices have a huge impact, as does general instability in the world. A lot of what we are doing at international level, whether it is ourselves through the UN or the EU, has a trickle-down effect because prices are very sensitive to international instability.

I look forward to this Bill progressing. The Department has set out some of the issues it believes it has with the Bill but it does not seem that any of those could not be fixed by amendments on Committee Stage. Those areas would need to be examined to make sure this Bill is proportionate and benefits consumers but also businesses, some of whom can be victims as well-----

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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Exactly

Thomas Byrne (Meath East, Fianna Fail)
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-----of abuse of market dominance. We support this Bill in the sense of letting it pass to the next Stage and wish it success for the future.

Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour)
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I thank the Minister of State for his response. Both he and I live in the real world. Who we are and where we come from insists we do. We shop in the same places and in the same supermarkets and we see what is going on. We are connected into that and the concerns of the working families we all represent.

The Bill itself is a modest proposal. I am not suggesting and never did at any point, despite the public clamour a couple of years ago, that we should, for example, introduce price controls, because they have inadvertent consequences. Grocery price orders went out a long number of years ago and for very good reason. One of the reasons at the time was because it was supposed to usher in competition, but we know, compared with analogous EU states, we have very limited competition in the supermarket sector here.

That goes back to the potential for abuse of a dominant position. We will never get the full picture in terms of the operation of the Irish retail groceries trade if there is no obligation on those involved to publish and share their profits, in a way that respects commercial sensitivity. Nobody is expecting any operator to simply come out and say this is what they are doing, and they are entitled themselves. The supermarket sector in Ireland and elsewhere is composed of different corporate models. We still have some independently owned businesses. We have international businesses and multinational corporations that are traded on the stock market and so on. We have different company formations and we need to take account of that.

As I said earlier, we cannot say definitively there is not a form of price-gouging occasionally going on in the Irish supermarket sector if we do not have access to all the information to allow us to make that determination. The CCPC simply does not have that information. This modest proposition seeks a way in which we can do that in order to bring greater transparency to the Irish supermarket sector. We hope this will lead to greater fairness for Irish consumers, who have been stiffed at the checkout.

A number of years ago I likened the trip to the supermarket to do the weekly shop to being as welcome as a visit to the dentist. It was and still is very difficult for people. It is becoming as expensive as a trip to the dentist also. That goes to show that the cost of accessing services, more generally, is increasing. Nobody is saying the State should take out a large hammer and decide to make all kinds of interventions, which never worked in the past, and pretend they will work now.

As I said, this is a modest proposal. I am open to introducing amendments which would fine-tune and streamline legislation, and address some of the apparent inconsistencies that may be inherent in the Bill. The Government understands the principle and what it is we are trying to achieve. For example, it is absolutely right that we make a distinction between SMEs and larger corporations. The Minister is entirely right that when it comes to competition, consumer law and prices throughout the economy, when competition law and consumer law are not working the way they were intended, good businesses are impacted. These are businesses that comply with the law, employ people fairly and do their business fairly. Good and proportionate regulation weeds out the cowboy operators and sends a message that we will not tolerate how they operate. When there is greater transparency around pricing structures and the operation of a large sector like this that is so important to our everyday needs, it encourages better behaviour and practice and it weeds out that bad practice.

There are debates on going throughout the world, and I am always attracted to the writings of Mr. Robert Reich, a US academic, economist and former labour secretary under President Bill Clinton. As I did earlier, he talks about how it is not always the job of the State to resource people to deal with the increased cost of living. There are questions around wages, collective bargaining and ensuring workers gain more from their productivity, but there is also a significant role for the State with regard to regulating markets. We have seen trammelled and record profits from large corporations in recent years. There have been examples of enormous profit taking. That is an inequality. The distance between working people and those who run these major corporations has grown, and there has been a multiplier effect. We see CEOs of corporations who used to earn 20 or 30 times what someone on the factory floor would make, earn 300, 400 or 500 times that amount. That encourages the rise of populism and creates the political problems we now have in the world.

There is a job for Government to do regarding smart and proportionate regulation. That is what this Bill is about. I welcome Government TDs not opposing it. I wish to work with the Government to get this to Committee Stage and nuance and finesse it because if we do, and if we succeed in getting it enacted, we will empower the CCPC to do more. I accept there is legislation empowering the CCPC that could be better used and applied to regulate the sector, but there is no legislation anywhere that for example, compels supermarkets to share information that they need to share with our regulators if our regulators are to be respected and empowered. I accept that improvements can be made and I want to do that. If we enact something like this, the consumers of Ireland will thank us for it, and so will all the decent businesses.