Vol. 523 No. 5
164 Mr. Lawlor asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment if she has yet arrived at a determination on the retention or discontinuation of the Restrictive Practices (Groceries) Order, 1987; and her views on the arguments by a person (details supplied) that the abolition of the order will seriously damage smaller retailers and family owned businesses. [21760/00]
The Groceries Order, 1987 was one of 40 recommendations on a variety of aspects of Competition and Mergers legislation, the enforcement of competition law, including the groceries order, and the administration of mergers law in the report of the competition and mergers review group which I published last May.
On the matter of the Groceries Order, the majority of the review group recommended that: the groceries order be repealed; any legislation or regulation introduced in relation to the grocery trade should not include a ban on below cost selling; some form of regulation be introduced in relation to the grocery trade which would in particular require suppliers to publish the terms on which they are prepared to trade with retailers, would require retailers to honour the credit terms on which suppliers are prepared to trade with them, would ban "hello money", and would require retailers not to discriminate between classes of customers in respect of the products which they sell.
