Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

I thank the Senators for a very good debate. The original debate on this was probably in 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, in which he said it was to not the virtue of the butcher, the baker or the candlestick maker that we owed our dinner, but to the invisible hand of competition. He also commented that business people never come together but to collude against the public interest. He had a fairly jaundiced view of the way in which competition can be manipulated. It may be 236 years later, but the debate here has also shown up the double standard that we sometimes apply on this subject. Some Senators were calling for rigid enforcement of competition law and jail for those in breach, while others were saying they were not so sure free competition should be allowed with regard to planning laws or in the grocery trade. When it came to below-cost selling, which is effectively State-enforced fixing of prices at a certain level, everyone was raising doubts. The double standard that we apply in this debate is very real. I take Senator Norris's point that we cannot set up competition law as the tin soldier that governs everything, but, to be fair to Senator Barrett, that tin soldier has been remarkably silent over the years in this country, and we have a lot of ground to make up. This is a tricky area. Senator Quinn put his finger on it: we all like competition when it does not visit our particular door, but when it is in an area in which we feel we are entitled to behave in a certain way, we are not so sure about the level of competition we want to see. That is true in so many walks of life, and it is a challenge for those of us in public life who are trying to act as an arbiter between the different forces in our community. That is what makes this an important debate.

I appreciate the points made by Senator White, who wants to see civil fines but also wants to see people in jail, which would happen if these were criminal offences. The difficulty with wanting these two things is that it undermines the case for civil laws. As Senator Byrne said, a former Minister, Mary Harney, introduced criminal sanctions for breaches of competition law, but that implies that such behaviour is a criminal offence. We cannot then slip in the back door and say we are going to apply a different standard of proof than in other criminal cases. We cannot ride the two horses together. That is the point the Attorney General has been making.