The president of the Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers’ Association (ICSA), Edmond Phelan, has commended the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Business Enterprise and Innovation for “grilling” the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC).
At its meeting on Tuesday night, October 1, representatives from the CCPC came before the committee to answer questions from the deputies.
Phelan noted that the ICSA had previously called for an Oireachtas investigation into the CCPC.
The ICSA president said: “ICSA was outraged at the unwarranted intervention by the CCPC into recent beef talks and its extreme interpretation of competition law.
For that reason, we called for an Oireachtas investigation to find out why the CCPC was so proactive when it came to farmers who have no ability to set the price, yet so powerless when it came to investigating the oligopoly structure of the meat processing sector.
“In particular, ICSA has repeatedly pointed out that it is unusual that no factory can tell what the price of beef will be for next week at 2:00pm on Friday and yet they all know the price at 4:00pm.
“However, this highly unusual state of affairs attracts no attention from the CCPC which, on the other hand, was very quick to threaten farmer representatives as soon as they entered beef talks with representatives of the meat factories.
The idea that it is illegal to even discuss the price of beef is an incredible conclusion in a liberal democracy. This is not North Korea.
“ICSA sees this as an incredibly extreme interpretation of competition law when the EU Competition Authority saw no difficulty with ABP taking over Slaney Foods, thus furthering its dominant position in meat processing.
“While the answers were not particularly satisfactory, we note that the CCPC agreed that there was possibly a need for an independent regulator to oversee the meat sector and to examine the breakdown of who gets what from the food chain.”
Concluding, Phelan stressed: “Competition law should be focused on the dominant players in processing and retailing.”