Irish producers have reacted angrily to suggestions that the republic’s planning guidelines be changed to facilitate the entry of another overseas multiple.
The chief executive of the National Consumer Agency (NCA), Ann Fitzgerald, made the call, claiming that removal of the current cap on store size would attract Asda or Costco into the market, stimulate competition and offer consumers “a real alternative”. She was commenting on a NCA survey of the three main supermarket groups, Tesco, Dunnes and Superquinn, which found their prices on a basket of more than 100 items virtually identical.
But the 80,000-member Irish Farmers’ Association dismissed her suggestion, and warned: “Experience shows that such a move would result only in a further squeeze on hard-pressed suppliers, while the multiples retain their margins at the expense of both producers and consumers.” Instead, it called for a speeding up of a statutory code of practice for the retail sector - being considered by government - “to be enforced by an ombudsman with the power to investigate retailers’ treatment of suppliers and impose substantial fines for breaches of the code”.
Such a system, it said, would prevent “supermarkets dictating prices and imposing below-cost terms on producers”. The Fitzgerland call was also rejected as “simplistic” by RGDATA, representing independent grocers. It pointed out that two newcomers, discount chains Aldi and Lidl, have opened in the Republic in recent years and now have a 10 per cent market share.
