Ikea move could spell doom for villages

FREE markets are not the answer to all our problems.

Tara Buckley of the independent retailers and symbols group, RGDATA, made that point well at one of the major retailing events of the year in Dublin earlier in the week.

While she represents her own constituency such as Musgrave Group and other symbol groups such as Spar, she spoke some truth.

Her point was there is more at stake in modern society than just the price of goods.

She fingered the Ikea decision as potentially one of the most dangerous by a government for some time. It paves the way for out of town shopping in key locations and could result is sucking the lifeblood from villages and towns if the fallout is as predicted.

Buckley is not alone in this. Last week, non-materialistically driven organisations such as Combat Poverty, and St Vincent de Paul, expressed their support for the Groceries Order and the Retail Planning Guidelines when they appeared before the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise and Small Business.

St Vincent de Paul’s representative spoke of the importance of the local grocer to disadvantaged communities. Shopping could become the preserve of people with a four-by-four and the V de P spokeswoman cautioned against any increase in the power of the multiples. She advocated the retention of the order and guidelines. Combat Poverty said large retail facilities, such as Liffey Valley, have left desolation and isolation in their wake.

Another telling statistic is that over 40% of British villages have no shops anymore while four major multiple groups headed by Tesco have cornered 80% of the retail grocery trade.

That’s the choice we are making if we go down the anything goes route in terms of capping store size and lifting the ban on below-cost selling.

One of the great difficulties in combating the prices argument is that the line of argument looks to be anti the consumer. And the consumer in today’s world is king. To an extent that’s true, but often the bigger the truth the bigger the deception.

At the core of the debate is the trickle-down economics argument favoured by those who believe if the wealthy are facilitated in making more money, then the rest do better as well.

That’s the accepted rationale driving Fine Gael’s Richard Bruton and economist Seán Barrett of Trinity College, to name a few, who were singled out by Buckley as apologists for free unencumbered markets.

They are part of the uncritical mob at this stage, admirers of the Milton Friedman school of economics which Maggie Thatcher took to her heart.

But free markets aren’t fully free, even when they are supposed to be.

George Bush was forced to pump the US economy a few years back after the markets crashed.

Such a move is contrary to everything he is supposed to believe in - that governments keep out of the way of economies, because they work best that way.

Statistics out of the US suggest the free markets are not delivering, however.

The better-off have become better off still more and the vast majority are no better-off and many are worse off since Bush started his tax giveaways.

It is ironic that Buckley, representing as she does 40% of the grocery trade, needed to rely on the testimony of Combat Poverty and St Vincent de Paul to make her case.

Combat Poverty and St Vincent de Paul being quoted from a podium in the Four Seasons Hotel in Dublin’s Ballsbridge at a business conference suggests the world is even gone madder than I thought or else that all principle has gone out the window.

I’m not sure which is the best option, but neither is terribly reassuring.