Seanad Éireann debate -
Wednesday, 18 Nov 1959

Vol. 51 No. 12

Restrictive Trade Practices (Amendment) Bill, 1959—Second Stage.

Question proposed: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time."

Minister for Industry and Commerce (Mr. J. Lynch)

The main object of this Bill is to amend in a number of respects the procedure laid down by the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1953, for the investigation of restrictive trade practices and for the elimination of those practices which are found to be unfair or to operate against the public interest.

Senators will recall that the Act of 1953 provided for the establishment of the Fair Trade Commission and for the vesting in the Commission of the power to investigate restrictive trade practices in regard to the supply and distribution of goods and the rendering, in the course of carrying on any trade or business, of any services affecting such supply or distribution. The Commission are empowered to make rules—known as fair trading rules— representing, in their opinion, fair trading conditions with regard to the supply and distribution of any kind of goods and the rendering of any services affecting such supply or distribution. Such rules have not the force of law, but represent a code of conduct for the particular trades concerned.

The Commission must keep under review the operation of fair trading rules and report to the Minister for Industry and Commerce if the rules are not being observed. As an alternative to the making of fair trading rules, the Commission may hold a public inquiry into the conditions which obtain in regard to the supply and distribution of the goods concerned. They may hold such an inquiry on their own initiative, but must do so if the Minister so requests. The Commission are required to submit to the Minister a report of every inquiry.

A report by the Commission in relation to the non-observance of fair trading rules, or following the holding of a public inquiry, must describe the conditions which obtain in regard to the supply and distribution of the goods concerned. The report must indicate whether these conditions prevent or restrict competition or restrain trade or involve resale price maintenance. If, in the opinion of the Commission, any such interference with trade or competition is unfair or operates against the public interest, the report must give reasons for the Commission's conclusions. The Minister, having considered such a report, may make an Order prohibiting specified arrangements, agreements or practices in the trade concerned. An Order so made by the Minister does not have the force of law unless and until it is confirmed by an Act of the Oireachtas.

To date, 19 sets of fair trading rules have been made relating to the supply and distribution of a wide variety of commodities, and six public inquiries have been held in relation to the supply and distribution of radio and television sets, building materials, motor vehicles, grocery goods, chemists' preparations and carpets. Reports of all six enquiries have been submitted to the Minister, and five of these reports have been published. The other report, relating to carpets, is at present under consideration by me. As Senators are doubtless aware, a further inquiry, in relation to the supply and distribution of motor spirit and motor vehicle lubricating oil, was initiated recently by the Commission and is in progress at the present time.

Orders have been made in relation to the supply and distribution of radio and television sets, building materials, motor cars and grocery goods. The operation of the Orders relating to motor cars and radio and television sets has been reviewed by the Commission, and reports have been submitted in the matter to me. In both instances, the Commission's recommendation was that the Order should not be altered, and this recommendation was accepted.

An examination has been made of the operation of the Restrictive Trade Practices Act, 1953, in the light of experience over the past six years. In the course of the examination, consideration was given to the question whether legislation embodying a different approach to restrictive trade practices, such as is followed in some other countries, would be more suitable to conditions here. The conclusion reached was that the machinery of the 1953 Act is fundamentally sound and that it has enabled substantial progress to be made in a relatively short time in eliminating some of the more objectionable features of restrictive practices in many trades. Experience does suggest, however, that some modifications of the Act are desirable in relation to the scope of public enquiries and the procedure for the review by the Commission of the operation of Ministerial Orders.

I should explain that a public inquiry must deal with all the conditions which obtain in regard to the supply and distribution of the goods and all restrictive practices affecting their supply and distribution. This arrangement precludes the holding of an inquiry of limited scope, for example, an inquiry confined to one particular practice. I consider it desirable that the Commission should be empowered to hold such limited inquiries and Section 2 of the Bill provides accordingly.

The review of the operation of existing Orders is obviously an important part of the Fair Trade Commission's functions. Conditions in trades are liable to change and it is essential that the effect of Orders should be closely watched by the Commission. The 1953 Act requires the Commission to keep the operation of Orders under review and provides that the Commission may submit to the Minister a report in the matter together with their recommendations as to what action should be taken thereon. If a report by the Commission should indicate the necessity for amending an Order, it would be necessary to have a further public enquiry.

I regard this procedure for the amendment of Orders as cumbersome and unsatisfactory and I propose to remedy the position by the introduction of the new procedure which is provided for in Section 6 of this Bill. That section provides that the Commission may, on their own initiative, and shall, at my request, hold a special review of the operation of an Order. The Commission are required to publish notice of their intention to hold a special review and give interested parties an opportunity of making submissions in relation to the subject matter of the review.

It will be open to any interested person to ask the Commission to hold a public inquiry, instead of a special review, and, if the Commission decide against holding a public inquiry, they must inform the party concerned of the reasons for their decision. The Commission will be required to submit to the Minister a report of every special review and, if they are of opinion that the relevant Order should be amended, they must recommend accordingly and indicate the form of amending Order which they consider necessary. A copy of the Report of every special review will be laid before each House of the Oireachtas.

I propose to avail of the opportunity offered by this Bill to introduce a new provision authorising the Fair Trade Commission to investigate restrictive practices imposed by employers or employees affecting the use of specific materials or methods for manufacturing or construction purposes. Perhaps the best example I can give the House of the type of practice which I have in mind is the one-time refusal of carpenters to install steel windows in new houses. I must explain that that particular practice is not relevant now. Section 4 of the Bill authorises the Commission to undertake inquiries into such matters at my request.

In essence, the aim of the section is to enable the Commission to investigate complaints that restrictive practices relating to the use of specific materials or methods prevent the reasonable development of trade and business and inflate costs. It is not the intention that Orders will be made on receipt of a report from the Commission dealing with practices of this kind. I feel, however, that it will serve a useful purpose if such practices are inquired into and reported on by an impartial body such as the Fair Trade Commission.

The Bill provides also for some minor amendments of the Act of 1953 which are, in the main, consequential on the principal amendments which I have already mentioned. I believe that this Bill will strengthen the procedure established by the Act of 1953 for the investigation of restrictive trade practices and for the abolition of those practices which are unfair and contrary to the public interest. I feel sure the Bill will commend itself to the House.

Mr. McGuire

This Bill, like the preceding Bill, seems to be an improvement on its predecessor. As the Minister says, the procedure has been made less cumbersome and, I might say, less crude than in the original Act. The actual working of an Act always brings out its weaknesses and it is good to see that the necessary changes are made with expedition, as has been done comparatively quickly in this case. There is no doubt that the original Commission when it sat suffered from a certain amount of inexperience, as we shall call it, as regards trade conditions and trade practices in many cases.

There is no doubt that business people were very perturbed and very upset by the workings of the original Act. Even the strongest protagonists of the Act will admit that a certain amount of pillorying of reputable business people was done.

The idea behind many of these public circuses, if one may so describe them, seemed to be that the business community were engaged in practices contrary to the public interest. Due to preconceived ideas as to certain trading practices, such as price maintenance, it was believed that anybody engaging in price maintenance agreements was really acting contrary to the public interest, and all that had to be done was to establish that price maintenance existed and then proceed to condemn it. The business community are glad that the Minister said in the Dáil the other day that it is now accepted by his Department and by the Commission that very often price maintenance agreements are, in fact, not detrimental to the public interest at all. That is one fact that has been established.

In the initial stages of the implementation of the Act, it was worked rather crudely. That was due to the fact that the machinery was both cumbersome and crude in itself. As the Minister has explained now, a certain element of a more discreet form of machinery is being introduced. That is welcome because there will be less noise and more good work done. For that reason, we welcome the changes in this Bill.

The Minister seems to be satisfied with the way the Act worked but I notice Deputy Booth, quite rightly, pointed out in the Dáil that a certain amount of chaos and confusion had been caused in certain trades. People who are in a position to provide first-class service of every kind and on whose integrity customers could rely have been put in a very awkward position. At the same time, irresponsible traders have been brought into existence and enabled to set up in business, very often without the know-how or the machinery to give the service expected from them. That is notably true of the motor trade, and even the wireless trade. These two were quoted.

There has been an encouragement of cut-price shops. Cut-price is the basis of all good commercial competition, provided the price cutting is done in the proper background; that is to say, that proper service is given, proper wages paid, and so forth. Very often, cut-price is not the be-all and the end-all of commercial trading. I think it is being recognised that a certain amount of injustice has been done to good traders and certain undesirable traders have been brought into existence because of the work of this Fair Trade Commission. Of course, nothing works perfectly and I do not wish to condemn too much at this stage. Having gone through the birth pains, a smoother stage of growth and development may be experienced. I think everybody has learned a good deal more as to how business works and operates, to say nothing of discovering that things are not always what they seem to be at first glance.

The alteration in the machinery proposed in this Bill may ensure that restrictive trade practices legislation will in future work more fairly for everybody concerned. There is an interesting departure in this Bill. A new feature is introduced. Workers and employees are mentioned. It was manifestly unfair that up to now there should be inquiries into restrictive trade practices of only one side of business, industry and commerce. Indeed, that was almost contrary to the Constitution. But, even now, under this Bill, employees are introduced in a very timid way. We hope henceforth everybody will get a fair crack of the whip and that in future employees and trade unions will be made to answer for practices which are detrimental to the public interest. Why should any section of the community be put not only above the ordinary law but above the moral law? I am not talking now as an employer but merely as someone examining this Bill. It is only fair that employees, even if in a very limited way, should be included within the scope of legislation such as this. That is something that will be welcomed.

In the Dáil, the Minister, in reply to Deputy Cosgrave, explained that the mention of employees applies only to the refusal or alleged refusal to use particular materials or particular methods. That is welcome but I am sorry, and so will many other people be sorry, that this provision will not apply to restrictive trade practices at our ports in relation to containers. This is a most important trade to the country and the present situation may have a most detrimental effect on our turkey trade and other exports to Britain. I do not wish to labour the point too much, but this provision is a major introduction into the Bill, although it comes in in a very gentle way at the moment. I make no bones and the public make no bones about saying that employees should come under scrutiny just as fully and fairly as employers. It is only right that employees and trade unions should take their place as well. The Bill is an improvement on its predecessor. I hope that it will prove smoother in operation, less harsh and more popular than its predecessor.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

I would not agree with all that Senator McGuire has said about either the first Bill or this Bill. I am not fully convinced that this Bill represents an advance. There are some details of improvement. I got a feeling—I may be wrong—that the Government, which was the Government which first introduced the Fair Trade Commission, became embarrassed by the very efficient way in which it set about working. I have a feeling that there was a hope that it would be a kind of window-dressing Commission which would not get very much real work done but the Government would be able to say: "We set up a Commission. What more can we do?" I feel the embarrassment was caused not only to some businessmen but also to the Government when they saw the Fair Trade Commission really getting down to brass tacks in relation to a number of businesses, asking questions and finding out certain practices, and exposing them to the light of day, which I do not believe to be a bad thing. My hope is that this amending Bill is not a very subtle and indirect way of nullifying, or making it possible to nullify, much of the excellent work already done by the Fair Trade Commission in relation to so many trades.

Senator McGuire said the early methods were crude and that certain reputable businessmen were pilloried. I think that, in saying that, he is being less than fair to the Fair Trade Commission. Most of us will remember the early inquiries and the full Press coverage given to them and most of us will recognise in relation to certain trades—wireless dealers, the building trade, the grocery trade, the chemists, infant foods and so on—that while very searching questions were asked, the businessmen were allowed to be represented by counsel and their rights were thoroughly protected. Really, the awkwardness was produced by the fact that they found it very difficult to give straight answers in public to certain questions it was in the public interest to have answered.

Senator McGuire hopes that the Bill will enable the Fair Trade Commission in future to be more discreet. I am afraid of that. I believe that from the outset they have been most scrupulous. They have insisted on bringing out in the open certain secret agreements and arrangements and cartels and price fixing and so on with which I do not agree and which are not in the public interest. I think that is the most effective way to fight them, to bring them out into the open. The Fair Trade Commission especially can do that with most beneficial results to the buying public.

I should like also to touch on the question mentioned by Senator McGuire of, as he said, people without the know-how going into business and their having been encouraged by the Fair Trade Commission. With all respect to Senator McGuire, I feel that that is simply nonsense. When people without the know-how go into business, or attempt to go into business, the assumption is that they go out of business as quickly as they went into it. Unless they are giving value to the public—in which case they justify their efforts—they will go out of business and there is no use saying they will be engaging sweated labour because labour conditions and hygiene conditions are controlled by trade unions and legislation. Therefore, if people without the know-how go into business, they are doing no harm to anybody but themselves and they will go bankrupt pretty rapidly.

There is a great deal of squealing in this country about cut-price shops. Provided their conditions of employment and hygiene—which, as I say, are regulated, quite apart from the Fair Trade Commission—are all right, my feeling is that cut-price shops will be supportted in the measure they give the public what the public wants. I am old-fashioned enough to believe that the public should have the right to choose. We used be told that one of the principles of free enterprise and the profit system was that the business man was in duty bound to buy on the cheapest market and sell on the dearest, and that small profits made for quick returns and that competition was the life of trade. I suggest that if we believe in free enterprise and so on, we must accept the results of real competition and not tolerate the behind closed doors arrangements made between reputable businessmen arranging to take more profits from the public than, as the cut price shops demonstrate, need be taken.

My hope is that this Bill is not an indirect way of watering down the power of the Fair Trade Commission. On the face of it, I think it is possible that the Fair Trade Commission will, under this Bill, be able to act just as efficiently as before, but there are some sections about which I have a certain amount of doubt. In Section 6, I notice that "the Commission may, on their own initiative, and shall, at the request of the Minister, hold a special review of the operation of an Order under Section 9 of the Principal Act." I am a little suspicious of that. The Minister can force the Commission to re-open the whole question of an Order that has been made, with a view either to amending it or revoking it. Perhaps I am over suspicious. Perhaps that is quite justifiable in practice.

In the same section, in sub-section (6), I think there is a fault in drafting which would require to be amended on Committee Stage. The sub-section reads:

The Commission shall submit to the Minister a report of every special review and the report shall state whether any request was made to the Commission under sub-section (4) of this section and, if so, give the reasons for their decision not to accede to the request.

Now I take it that means that the Commission are bound to report special reviews, but there seems to be a defect there between inquiries and special reviews because it looks here as if the Commission would only make a decision not to accede to the request. I suppose if they do accede to a request, and hold an inquiry, there will also be a report. I do not see that referred to here, specifically—a fresh inquiry.

I notice in Section 7, sub-section (2), that when the Commission gives a report to the Minister, and the Minister lays this before each House of the Oireachtas, the Minister may expunge certain details from that report before the Houses of the Oireachtas see it. It states:

It shall be lawful for the Minister after consultation with the Commission to omit from the copy any information contained in the report the publication of which would, in his opinion, materially injure the legitimate interests of any person, if such information is not essential to the full understanding of the report.

I am very suspicious of that blanket sub-section which enables the Minister to expunge from the records of the inquiry certain facts for fear of embarrassing certain business interests. I feel that if the Commission make a report, we have the right to read it and that it should be laid in full on the Tables of the Houses.

I noticed Section 8 with some amusement. Section 8, subsection (2) says—

Section 9 of the Principal Act is hereby amended by the insertion in subsection (5) after "months" of "(being months in which Dáil Éireann or Seanad Éireann has sat for not less than three days)".

That subsection (5) in question, of the original Act, states that the Minister shall comply with sub-section (4) within three months after he has received the report. Subsection (4) says:

If the Commission in a report to the Minister recommends the making of an Order and the Minister decides not to make any Order he shall lay before each House of the Oireachtas a statement giving the reasons for his decision.

The purpose of the subsection here is to oblige the Minister to lay such a statement before each House of the Oireachtas, not within three months as was said, but within three months which are months in which Dáil Éireann or Seanad Éireann have sat for not less than three days.

I was amused because the people will remember the Minister's failure to take any action on the recommendation of the Fair Trade Commission on infant foods and medical preparations and the Minister in fact failed utterly to comply with this Section 9 of the Principal Act. In other words, he disregarded it and got away with it completely. The report in question was laid before him in December, 1956, and in July, 1957, six months later, on the last day of the Dáil session, he stated he was not going to make an Order and he circulated a short statement in which he said that "under Section 9 subsection (5)"—the subsection we are here asked to amend—"this statement must be laid before each House of the Oireachtas within three months after the Minister has received the report from the Commission in order to comply with the subsection. The present statement should have been laid before the Oireachtas before the 29th March last"—he is writing this in July—"but the circumstances of the general election and the ensuing change of Government delayed consideration of the report and made it impossible to comply in time with the requirement of the subsection." The point I am making and the one that causes me a certain amount of amusement is that the Minister was apparently not bound in the slightest by the section and I am really at a loss to know why he wants to amend it since he blandly disregards it when he wants to do so and apparently no one finds anything wrong with that.

I do not want to delay the House further. I hope this amending Act is not for the purpose of weakening the power and influence of the Fair Trade Commission. I hope it is not going to be discreet in the sense of allowing itself to be muzzled or have its powers watered down to the point where it will be doing no work. I desire to see it continue the excellent work it has so well begun.

Mr. Barry

I hope Senator Sheehy Skeffington will not be offended if I suggest that when he was a small boy he played the game we know as "Cops and Robbers" and that the habit of mind has persisted ever since with him. It is very easy to restrict trade in this country at the moment. I do not know of any traders who do not agree that we are living in a very violent buyers' market. Frequently, goods are sold at too near cost; too often small traders go into insolvency through price cutting. That results in bad debts for wholesalers and disemployment, and, in general, the breaking down of the small units of our economy. It is not a buoyant economy in which the sellers could probably gang up. I do not see much danger of that here.

I am a restricted person; I buy goods and sell them and I live on the profit, if there is any after paying for the labour of those who help me to sell the goods and if I obey all the financial restrictions placed on me by my bankers, the local authority and by the State and particularly when I obey the restrictions placed on me by my competitors.

Mr. J. Lynch

The Deputy is a decent man but I never knew he was a philanthropist.

Mr. Barry

I am fighting very hard to keep my head over water and have been doing so for some years. I am not blaming the Minister or his Administration for that. Apart from those restrictions, I have to obey restrictions placed on me by health and personal habits. They are also considerable. I must continue working to get a living until I die and the Seanad will not meet and agree to pay me a handsome gratuity for the rest of my life. I am conditioned by all that to restriction.

I suppose in an age of restriction like this, when we have become conditioned to it, it may seem reasonable to put up with a little more in exchange for the kind of tidying up that seems to appear in this Bill. The Bill makes a slight move forward from the present position. I particularly approve of Section 3 under which, as well as the wicked employers, the employees also are to be asked to account for certain activities. That is a step forward.

I suffer a lot through restrictive practices and I am sure the House and you, Sir, will forgive me, if I tell the Minister that his predecessor initiated a very deliberate restrictive practice on me as a tea merchant. I objected very strongly. I wonder whether the Minister should not prosecute his predecessor, who is now Taoiseach, for engaging in restrictive practices by telling me that I was not free to import tea—even though it must be imported as we cannot grow it—and that if I did import it, I would have to pay 3d. a lb.——

Mr. J. Lynch

They got silver salvers last night for restricting you.

Mr. Barry

They are the boys who got more than silver salvers. I did not get a silver salver. I got a bill for 3d. for every lb. of tea I brought in ever since I got that Minister in this House sitting in the chair in which the Minister is now sitting to promise that that 3d. would not be charged. He broke his word afterwards. That was restrictive and I suggest the Minister might investigate that. I have no more to say. The Bill makes a very slight advance on conditions obtaining up to now. For that reason, I welcome it but it is a most qualified welcome.

Mr. Burke

I welcomed the last Bill which we had to deal with but I cannot welcome this one because at this stage we should have a Bill introduced to wipe away all the restrictive practices that are hampering our economy and preventing us from making progress here. We are looking speculatively at the little traders in the country towns who are cutting one another's throats in competition in a contracting economy and trying to legislate to make these people compete even more keenly among themselves and driving a number of them out of business because there is not room for all of them. Some people stand up here and laud the cut-price shops but the fact that many of the people employed in the cut-price shops are either underpaid or juvenile labour is ignored. Restriction is impeding our imports every day of the week and it is not dealt with at all. The greatest restriction in Ireland to-day is the restriction on our ports. We have to compete against the British in their own market and they are very large producers of agricultural produce which is our main export. They have the advantage of being on the spot with that produce in England. They are able to subsidise it to the extent of £250,000,000 a year. We have not the money to subsidise our agriculture on the same level but at least we could get rid of restrictive trade practices.

In its original conception and its continued form—although there is some slight improvement in it—this is an emasculated measure that does not even propose to deal with the situation. The Minister in his speech in the other House spoke about building materials. When this Bill came here in the first instance, I said there should be an investigation of the whole building trade covering the period from the raising of the gravel at the gravel pit to the handing over of the key to the person coming into the house. There was a which hunt in regard to a few builders here in Dublin—I have no interest in them—but if there is to be a Restrictive Trade Practices Act it should apply to everybody and should fall on all sections of the community equally.

In so far as the Minister says he will bring other people into this Bill, I approve; but that does not go far enough. We talk very knowledgeably about restrictive practices. We cannot restrict some of the things happening in this country because they come from outside. Small manufacturers are competing against one another. Traders selling their goods are competing violently against one another and are cutting down the margins of the manufacturers until some of the small industries here are almost non-existent. Imported goods are being sold in a completely restrictive way. Somebody goes into a town with a manufactured item and says: "This is imported and we will give you the exclusive trading right for it." They charge what they like; it has a snob value. They say: "This is imported; it is better and it is exclusive to you. We are the only ones in town who have it." The Irish manufactured product is being sold cheaply because it is held to be not as good.

That is the type of propaganda Irish industry is up against. I agree with what the Minister for Finance said last week. If we could reduce our costs, we would be able to expand our exports and not have this appalling competition. It is caused by the fact that nearly everything manufactured here is so high in price that we cannot afford to export it and the people here cannot afford to buy it. Those are the facts. If we can do anything to remove one of our natural disadvantages—the fact that we have to carry our goods to Britain or Europe —if we can remove restrictive practices at our ports through this Bill, then we shall be helping our people to progress. If we could export more, we could have more competitive prices at home and we would not have the need for this semi-socialistic measure brought in here to placate people and further prevent us from making progress.

Mr. J. Lynch

I fail to understand the contribution of Senator Sheehy Skeffington to this debate. I can quite understand the import of and the reason for the remarks of Senator Barry but it is difficult to reconcile the attitude of Senator Sheehy Skeffington with reality. He says, in the first instance, that he thought the 1953 Act was a good thing and that the Government which produced it did a good thing, but he goes on to say that the operation of the Act has embarrassed the Government; in other words, that the Government created a Frankenstein or threw a boomerang. I should like to assure him that the Fianna Fáil Government are quite satisfied with the operation of the Fair Trade Commission.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

They did not implement its recommendations.

Mr. J. Lynch

They are quite satisfied that it has given the public an implement that has helped to improve the economy and the confidence the ordinary people can have in business practices. It has helped to remove many doubts they would otherwise have had as to such practices. Neither can I understand the Senator's cynicism when he suggests, with a certain amount of amusement, that the Minister broke the terms of the Bill following the inquiry into chemist preparations. The Senator will reflect on the time when this inquiry took place and when the report of the Commission was presented. He will remember that the report was presented about 29th December, 1956; that in the month of February, 1957, the Dáil was dissolved; that about 20th or 23rd of March, the new Dáil assembled; and that the three months expired on 29th of the same month. In other words, the new Minister was given about four or five, or six days at the most, in which to consider the report of the Commission. The Minister considered the report of the Commission, but no human being would expect him to consider it with any degree of reasonable assessment in such a short period. I do not see anything to justify the Senator's cynicism in this respect.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

Why did you leave it until the day the Dáil rose for the summer recess?

Mr. J. Lynch

On the contrary, I think the Minister was very wise. Rather than rush into a hasty decision on a report in order to comply with the letter of the law but nevertheless create hardship, the Minister announced his decision in July and, as it happened, did not implement the recommendations of the Commission.

Dr. Sheehy Skeffington

On the last day the Dáil met.

Mr. J. Lynch

Whether it was the last day or not, the Minister was fully entitled to a reasonable period in which to assess the implications of such a report. The Senator perhaps thinks that the occasion of a new Government is one on which everything must be forgotten except some report in which the Senator has a particular interest? I was quite prepared to be indulgent with the Senator's criticism but when he goes around looking for spectres behind every comma, dot and crossing of a "t" in a Bill, the genuineness of his criticism becomes suspect.

I think the Senator completely misunderstood, too, the effect of Section 6 under which the Commission, after a special review, will submit a report to the Minister and will, in the course of submitting that report, say whether they were requested to have an inquiry or give the reasons why they decided not to have an inquiry. I cannot understand the Senator's doubts about the effectiveness of that section. I may add that the introduction of this Bill was not to water down the effectiveness of the 1953 Act, as the Senator would like to suggest, but rather to make its implementation more expeditious and effective in so far as it provides that, instead of having to inquire into the whole scope of the practices in all aspects of a particular trade, the Commission may now, if they decide that only one aspect of the practices requires their attention, confine themselves to that particular practice. Again, rather than being embarrassed by the operation of the 1953 Act, we are introducing this measure in order to make for better implementation of the purposes of the 1953 Act. The Senator need have no doubts about that.

Senator McGuire quoted Deputy Booth who, on the Second Reading in the Dáil, referred to the chaos and confusion that was introduced into a certain industry. The chaos and confusion to which he referred was in the builders' providers' trade. The Order made in respect of builders' providers by the Commission contributed nothing to what he termed chaos and confusion. The inquiry was conducted and the Order made in 1956 which was one of the worst years in the record of builders' providers' business. Many of the builders' providers, particularly the older ones, stated that the Order was responsible for the difficulties the trade was experiencing at that stage On the other hand newcomers into the trade stated that following the review, they found that something beneficial had happened to the builders' providers' trade; the builders themselves found that the conditions under which they operated in the matter of buying the raw materials of their trade had improved; they were able to operate in a much more satisfactory position because of the element of competition that the Order infused into the builders' providers' trade. If there was chaos, it was largely caused by the recession that occurred in building in 1956.

I do not think there are any other points I have to make. In general, I welcome the manner in which the Bill has been accepted and I assure the House that the general consensus of opinion expressed here that the Bill will make for the better operation of our restrictive trade practices legislation is shared by the Government.

Question put and agreed to.

Committee Stage ordered for Wednesday, 2nd December, 1959.