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Has the government bitten off more than it can chew in grocery price debate?

In the aftermath of the government’s highly publicised Retail Forum meeting on grocery prices, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has refused to rule out the possibility of imposing a windfall tax on grocery retailers if there is evidence of unusually high profits.

While some companies did not publish detailed accounts, An Taoiseach said on Virgin Media’s Tonight programme that there was evidence some retailers were “securing bigger margins on their profits in Ireland than they would in other markets”.

It’s hard to see how this “evidence” could be brought to light without demanding that said retailers publish more detailed accounts.

The Retail Forum has likely crystalised the industry’s focus on price drops – at least on key staples - with major supermarket groups introducing milk, butter and bread price cuts. Nevertheless, complex supply chain operations do not lend themselves to immediate, news-bite solutions.

Speaking on The Irish Times’ Inside Politics podcast, political reporter Jack Horgan-Jones described the government’s Retail Forum meeting in decidedly dismissive tones as a “political trick as old as the hills – roughly equivalent to a kind of perp walk – where you bring in the people who are seen to be responsible – or at least semi-responsible for the bad thing – and you give them a bit of a bollocking and hopefully generate some good news headlines for yourself.”

“It’s basically a talking shop,” he continued, conceding that the government doesn’t “carry much of a big stick at all” when it comes to yielding the power to coerce retailers to lower prices. The one power they do have, are “powers under the 2007 legislation to set a price ceiling on certain staple goods”, within an emergency context such as a war or pandemic.

Thus, his summary of the forum was that in effect, it was, “more an advertisement of the government’s lack of immediate powers”. At the time of heading to print, ShelfLife had not seen any evidence to contradict this assessment.

Gillian Hamill, editor, ShelfLifemagazine

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