Media witch-hunt is damaging the structure of Irish business
Where is the team concept in competition? A team has rules, guidelines, orders and punishment set out for its members.
The purpose of the team is to do battle against competition with a view to winning.
The fact that team members agree on cost, methodology and price is not anti-competitive within the team.
A good example is a hurling or football team where each member accepts his role. His contribution is not anti-competitive but complementary to the success of the team as a whole.
However, if two different teams agree to a certain input and result, that would be anti-competitive - like, say, Kilkenny and Waterford always agreeing who should win every time they met.
Similarly, an oil industry brand or shop brand will agree policy, costs, methodology and price among its players (branches), but not among its competitors.
The relevant factors are physical location whereby, for example, a motor dealer in Donegal or west Galway is disadvantaged by location from Dublin port and therefore a network cost spread will be agreed.
This is not anti-competitive.
The agreement among the team players as to what margin or rate of pay, so to speak, they receive is not anti-competitive.
This witch-hunt in the media is seriously damaging the structure of business in Ireland. It appears that the happy times of businesses going to the wall because of ill-informed practices are more attractive to certain elements than the disciplined business practices of modern Ireland. Real business now requires education, discipline, ingenuity and enterprise. The fact that a few journalists do not understand this is no excuse for a major undermining investigation.
I do not think that a group brand agreeing market strategy and tactics to promote its business and success within a highly competitive market is anything close to anti-competitive.
This means that the Prime Time programme was flawed in its assumption that the discussion and written records on price, costs and agreed tactics were wrong. This is how a team should, and must, behave in order to survive.
A team player in Donegal or Kerry going to the wall for reasons of higher costs or ill-advised practice is not in the interest of the team.
There is an entire industry now developed around ways to use the media to obtain advantage, fair or unfair, over competition. This needs rigorously to be guarded against to stop the sort of hype that led to the programme on car industry practice as a whole being so unfair.
The study of a people trying to make a living requires that the student seeks out the real position as to why things are the way they are, and not assume some wrongdoing is afoot. The team aspect of competition must be respected and not denigrated, as was done on RTÉ’s Prime Time programme.
Oliver Lupton
CEO
Irish Petrol Retailers Association
Ashgrove House
Kill Avenue
Dun Laoghaire
Co Dublin
