Price of groceries isn’t the issue - you’re being ripped off anyway

WHETHER or not the Groceries Order is responsible for the high cost of living here, the fact remains that Ireland is a leader in the rip-off stakes.

That’s the point.

The consumer is being taken for a ride and whether it’s to the extent of €577 million a year, as the Competition Authority claims, or somewhat less, is academic.

Tara Buckley, director general of the Retail, Grocery, Dairy and Allied Traders Association (RGDATA), argued forcefully for the retention of the Groceries Order in an article in this newspaper yesterday.

With IBEC and the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise and Small Business, RGDATA is determined to save the Groceries Order.

It is understandable that IBEC and RGDATA are determined to protect their vested interests, and it can only be presumed that the Oireachtas committee is exclusively concerned with the interests of enterprise and small business.

Arguing for the retention of the Groceries Order, Tara Buckley made the point that other EU countries with low prices have similar bans.

I don’t know whether they have similar bans or not, but they definitely have lower prices.

She quoted Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Hungary as having in common low prices and bans on below-cost selling.

One other thing she might have included in what they have in common - an absence of the rapacious tax policy of the Irish Government, especially one that operates with stealth.

The Government is directly responsible for our inflated cost of living by virtue of the high level of taxation it extracts across a whole range of goods and services.

In other areas, it can wash its hands through denial of responsibility, even though it allows price increases which it can control.

The controversy now raging as to whether or not the Groceries Order should be scrapped is, to a certain extent, a load of waffle. That order cannot be blamed for higher charges in electricity, gas, a pint, a meal out, petrol, doctors’ fees, consultants’ fees - the list is endless. But public attention is being focused on that order as being solely responsible for the ridiculous prices that ambush people every day of the week.

The question of rip-off Ireland goes well beyond the door of your local supermarket - and the Government is quite indifferent to the cost of having to live in the real world.

Among other top-of-the-range comforts, they have Mercs which miraculously get filled with petrol, and credit cards which do not give them palpitations.

All paid for by taxpayers who should be preparing for a revolution by now.

To understand this Government’s priorities just remember the scandalous waste of money on such things as a €50 million e-voting system that never saw the light of day, despite the fact they were told it wouldn’t work. That’s just one example in a litany that must run into billions.

Whatever about interpreting the CSO figures about the cost of living, what cannot be disputed is the public outrage over prices.

What is extraordinary is the fact that Opposition parties are lining up with the Government’s inane efforts against the Competition Authority in relation to the Groceries Order.

What they should be doing is attacking the taxation-by-ambush culture in this country. Sometime next month Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin reaches decision point in relation to that order: scrap it or let it stand.

What it essentially comes down to is whether the minister is prepared to back artificially inflated prices of the vested interests of big business, which the Competition Authority claims, or the interests of the hard-pressed consumers who are bearing the brunt of it all.

In deciding whose side he’s on, Micheál Martin would be well-advised to consider the reaction to Eddie Hobbs’s Rip-Off Republic TV series. In the first week it had 503,000 viewers, rising to 667,000 in the second week and to 778,000 for the third instalment.

CONSIDERABLY more than 250,000 extra people tuned into the show since it commenced, a figure more representative of public opinion than any poll undertaken by any newspaper on any given issue. Put another way, more than 53% of all TV viewers on a Monday night tuned into the show.

What Eddie Hobbs is doing is nothing new. He’s simply pointing out that consumers are being ripped-off. We all know that. The politicians don’t, or couldn’t care less.

Eddie Hobbs is hammering the message home on national television and, in so doing, RTÉ is epitomising what public service broadcasting is all about.

He has tapped into a vein of angry public opinion on the cost of living here and, by so doing, has shown that he is more in touch with ordinary people than are politicians of all hues.

There is an argument by Donie Cassidy’s Oireachtas Enterprise Committee that the programme omitted figures which would have shown the Groceries Order in a better light. Mr Hobbs is on record that this order was designed specifically to boost retailers’ profits at the expense of consumers.

He has based all his revelations on official reports undertaken by State agencies such as Forfás, the Revenue Commissioners and the Competition Authority.

Now, Donie Cassidy is more synonymous with country and western music than as a champion of consumers’ interests.

He is chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise and Small Business, which is adamant that the order should be allowed to remain. Consultants - paid for by the taxpayers - were employed to advise it and, having examined statistics about it used in the programme, declared them to differ from figures they produced themselves.

For whatever reasons, Donie Cassidy has more faith in the figures produced by the consultants and is prepared to use them to prove Eddie Hobbs is wrong. It might dawn on him that the consultants got it wrong, but then, having spent more of the consumers’ money, he probably felt obliged to take their report as gospel.

The whole exercise is academic because no matter whose figures are correct, the fact remains that we live in a culture of rip-off in this country. It’s as simple as that.

Minister of State Tim O’Malley gave a graphic indication of how totally out of touch with ordinary people he is with his witless response to the Hobbs’ programme.

In accusing it of bias and “creative bankruptcy”, he inanely advised the public not to allow themselves be whipped into a froth by “relatively marginal problems”.

They may be marginal to Mr O’Malley, who is one of our extravagantly paid TDs, but at least 778,000 people do not agree with him.