Responding to reports today (Friday, March 11) that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) doesn’t have a role in monitoring price increases, president of the Irish Creamery Milk Suppliers’ Association (ICMSA), Pat McCormack, said that the public are entitled to wonder what the CCPC did see as its role?
McCormack said that any ordinary definition of ‘consumer protection’ had to involve protecting consumers from the kind of arbitrary price-hikes that the public are now seeing on a daily basis.
He said that, a clear pattern of behaviour was now apparent in “our ever-expanding network of quangos”: where imposing more regulations on already largely compliant groups was concerned, the quangos were “happy to get stuck in”.
“But where it involves taking on and regulating corporations – whether food or petrol retailers – then the quangos either retreated behind the narrowest interpretation of their remit or the consumers were told to shop around,” he said.
“The question for the CCPC is whether they actually want to protect consumers or whether they want to keep their heads down ’til this all blows over,” said McCormack.
He cited fertiliser as a perfect example of where the CCPC should be working and making determinations.
“We have a situation now where fertiliser has, effectively, trebled in just under a year. Obviously, this is due in large part, to global factors, but we have existing stores of fertiliser already bought and paid for and why should they now be sold at the new higher price?
The ICMSA president claimed that these stores of fertilisers are now being sold to farmers at much higher prices today.
“It’s an extraordinary fact that we have almost relentless interference by government quangos on every aspect of Irish farming with two exceptions: we can’t get the quangos to either look at our ever-decreasing margins from the retailers, and we can’t get the quangos to look at our ever-increasing inputs costs whether its energy, veterinary costs or fertiliser.
McCormack said that in the two areas that might help farmers, they get nothing but silence and vague assurances.