John Dardis (Progressive Democrats)

I welcome the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Deputy Martin, to the House. Some criticism has been made of the Bill that it is not a model of clarity. Certainly the Minister's opening statement was a model of clarity and simplicity in terms of explaining the need for the Bill and discarding some of the criticisms particularly in the area of predatory pricing.

The Bill provides for regulation. There cannot be unfettered competition in this sensitive area where food is concerned. I was always an advocate of the groceries order from the time I became a Member and consistently argued for it both within my party and on the floor of the House. When taking the Order of Business on one occasion last year I defended the groceries order once again and did so more recently in September when my party resolved that the order should be abolished. That was in accordance with the recommendations of the various reports and of the Consumer Strategy Group's recommendations and so on. The time had come for me to change my mind on the matter.

My original criticism was twofold. First, if unfettered competition was allowed, when the smaller people were out of business and the larger people dominated the market they would increase prices because they are quite ruthless in that regard. My second concern, and one that has not been mentioned so far, was the effect on the producer. It is particularly serious in the context of the supply of liquid milk. Those concerns were reasonable and needed to be expressed and I tried as far as possible to articulate them.

I also wanted to protect the local shop in the small community. It is my experience, where there is rapid development in County Kildare, that there has been an explosion in the number of convenience stores in the villages that are expanding, where there were few if any retail outlets. However, they are not independent, they are all members of multiples or groups. It is difficult to find the classical independent small retailer whom I would have been attempting to protect.

The Minister's figures have demonstrated that 2,500 such retailers left the business between 1987 and 2002. If one travels around the country, apart from the more rural parts in the west and south, it is difficult to find a small convenience store that is totally independent of the multiples or groups. The measure has passed its sell-by date. The market has moved on to a point where we had to accept that the order could no longer be valid in the interests of consumers.

Reference has been made to the matter of ghost-town Britain. I experienced that during the summer when I visited a village calling Sonning, not far from Henley-on-Thames. It is a beautiful idyllic English village of the type one sees on paintings and reads about in poems. Not only was there no food outlet there was no newspaper outlet in the village. There are societal and market reasons for that, including the fact that it is impossible to park on the tiny streets and everybody travels by car. That is the reason for the growth of outlets on the edges of towns where petrol stations sell groceries. That is happening here also where there has been an explosion in terms of the number of petrol outlets selling convenience foods and groceries. That leads me to the conclusion that petrol was not profitable but the groceries were quite profitable. It was not done for some philanthropic reason but because people realised there were profits to be made in selling those products. We have moved past the sell-by date.

There is a need for regulation, otherwise large groups will dominate the market. I saw what happened in my home town of Newbridge. Several years ago Dunnes Stores was built at one end of the town and it dragged all the trade from the other end of the town. Happily, due to the growth in population and the general economic welfare, that has changed and there is a balance. The Whitewater centre, one of the largest shopping centres outside Dublin, is locating in Newbridge. That is welcome. That was evidence of what might happen if a very large multiple was allowed to dominate.

The measures contained in the Bill deal with that issue but I wonder whether there should be a specific restriction on the level of market share that any one group, such as Tesco——