I do not think he has been here in relation to any consumer matters. I welcome him and wish him very well in his job. Perhaps the most important comment that the Minister made in the course of his address was when he said that if people insisted on getting straightforward answers to a few questions before joining a selling organisation there would be no need for this legislation. That is very fair, and I accept it. I am not inclined to accept, though, that the passage of this legislation will stop this type of problem. The only way we can stamp out this problem is to ensure that people who are vulnerable to approaches by such conmen as the type of people who generate this sort of selling practice realise that it it is to their detriment to involve themselves in such a scheme. We are not going to solve the problem until we do this. Anybody who promotes this type of pyramid or chain letter selling lacks very much the degree of integrity that we like to see in the business community. Unfortunately I cannot accept that converting an undesirable business into a criminal offence is going to stop the practice. It certainly is going to inhibit its operations. It certainly is going to create extra difficulties for people who promote this type of activity, but in the heel of the hunt the importance of this legislation is not just that it becomes a criminal offence but that everybody in the country who is vulnerable to the type of approach that these sweet-talking salesmen engage in must realise that it is to their absolute detriment even to listen to them, let alone participate in the activities promoted by these gentlemen.
Even though I have regretted the fact that we are not getting the opportunity we should get to consider the legislation, I feel obliged to compliment the draftsmen of the Bill. It must have been an extremely difficult problem to place on any parliamentary draftsman's desk. It is difficult to define chain-letter activities or pyramid selling or whatever we choose to call it. It must have been extraordinarily difficult for them to define exactly what they meant by pyramid selling schemes, and also to define the level of activity in such a scheme that should be criminal. It really is only a first glance and first consideration I have given to it, but it seems to me to be a well-drafted Bill so far as achieving its purpose is concerned, the purpose being to make a criminal offence out of the activities of promoters and participants in pyramid selling.
The Minister has already indicated the offences that arise under the Bill and has also in the definition section identified the offence aspects of pyramid selling. The idea behind these sales is not at all to sell goods to consumers in the ordinary sense. On most occasions that businessmen involve themselves in this type of promotion they are doing it because their products are such as would not sell in ordinary commercial circumstances. So from the very start you can almost invariably take it that the type of product promoted in this type of scheme just would not stand up to the ordinary business difficulties that people have in marketing products. The horrible part of it is that the promoter of the scheme is not so much concerned with the disposal of his product as with the acquisition of sales people. It is particularly reprehensible because it is done on a private basis, frequently to private individuals who feel that their ordinary work, employment and so on does not generate enough income for them. They are very frequently in financial need themselves. They are easily conned by the sweet-talking salesman who promotes this type of activity. They fall into it and, as the Minister has very properly pointed out, these people often find themselves in deeper financial trouble after a short time in these schemes and in order to try to extricate themselves, as they believe, they find that they have to go in deeper, and the deeper they involve themselves in participating in pyramid selling the deeper come their troubles and financial difficulties and the more difficult it becomes for them to get out at all.
The problem that we are trying to deal with here is not going to solve many of the offensive sales practices that are so prevalent today. We need to enact legislation providing for a cooling-off period in relation to any direct door-to-door sales. Many people, particularly housewives, who meet salesmen at their doorstep are particularly vulnerable to the very experienced and very well-trained sales talk of some door-to-door salesmen. These people are entitled to a reasonable time within which to reflect upon their transaction, speak to other members of their family and decide whether they really want the item they have bought, whether they need it or whether they have been conned into purchasing the article they have bought at their doorstep. Many of the articles sold in this way are articles that people would not think of buying if they were not induced by sales talk into buying.
Often I think pretty worthless encyclopaedias and other expensive reading material are sold in this way. People are told these are very desirable things to have available in their homes as reading material for their children. When people's good intentions in relation to their family are appealed to in this way they find it sometimes very difficult to resist the temptation. Methods of easy repayments for the initial outlay in the purchase of these encylopaedias or similar type products are further inducements.
The Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Bill which was passed by this House not so long ago and which will become law fairly shortly will be of assistance here, but we need to do far more in relation to the education of consumers and people who are vulnerable to this type of approach. I appreciate that the Director of Consumer Affairs has not been in business for a very long time but he has been there for a couple of years. I do not know what he is being paid. I do not want to suggest that he is not earning his salary but I really wonder whether we are satisfied that the office of the Director of Consumer Affairs is working as well as it should be. I, more than most people who are not privileged to be Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas, am probably sensitive to advisory advertisements that the Director of Consumer Affairs would publish, but the impact that the office of the Director of Consumer Affairs appears to be making is very slight if it is there at all. The passage of legislation like this and the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Bill is all very fine in itself but it is not going to achieve anything in real, significant terms unless the ordinary Seán Citizen is alive to the dangers faced in dealing with some sales-people.
I hope that the office of the Directror of Consumer Affairs is sufficiently well financed. There have been complaints about that previously. I wonder whether he is sufficiently independent. I argued very forcibly on the Consumer Information Bill that he should be established in an agency removed from a Government Department, that he should have an independent budget and that he should be sufficiently well staffed and resourced to ensure that he can carry out his functions. At this remove from the passage of the Consumer Information Act and the establishment of his office I do not believe that he has made the impact that he should make and I am sure that he would like to make. I wonder just how much of this is due to the lack of resources on his part.
I also compliment the Minister on the inclusion in the Bill of a provision for the court claims that are known as piggyback claims. At section 6 of the Bill, the penalties section, there is provision for compensation to be paid to a victim of a pyramid sales promoter whereby where the promoter or a participant is convicted in court the court will have the right to award a portion of the fine imposed to the victim by way of compensation. That is very practical in the context of consumer legislation generally, because it removes the necessity that ordinarily lies on the consumer to bring his own independent civil action to recover compensation. It is more likely, therefore, to be seen as being of immediate consumer advantage than the Bill would be without that provision. Although constitutional difficulties might arise, I regret that the amount of the compensatory aspect of the fine cannot be greater than £500. The right that is given to include in the fine a compensatory element is limited, as I read the Bill, to orders of the District Court or orders of the Circuit Court on a District Court appeal and, therefore, has a ceiling of £500 on it.
I imagine that if one were to compensate properly not just witnesses at the hearing but all people who are known to have suffered at the hands of some pyramid sales promoter, the figure might be far in excess of this. It is making fish of one and flesh of another to allow compensation to the abused consumer who has on the one hand given evidence in court on the hearing of the criminal charge against the promoter while on the other hand denying the same right to another consumer who was not called to give evidence. I appreciate that the Minister's Department are trying to be practical in their approach in this sense, but our legal system is such as to discourage actions by consumers to recover compensation for wrongs done to them by unscrupulous business people, and I think that this is an ideal solution. I accept that there are difficulties involved in it but if provision were included in this Bill for a hearing on indictment before a Circuit Court judge or a High Court judge where the limit is £10,000, very many more consumer victims could be compensated than are going to be under the Bill.
There are other points that I would raise in relation to the contents of the Bill but they are more appropriate to Committee Stage. I would like to conclude by stressing again the fact that, although we are moving in the right direction in passing this legislation, and I accept that it is necessary, I do not believe that it is going to have the impact it needs to have unless at the same time a major publicity programme is engaged in by the Director of Consumer Affairs or by the Minister's office to advise the public of the dangers inherent in pyramid selling. Despite the fact that this has been raised in the Dáil and in this House before and there have been questions asked about it in the Dáil, despite the fact that this legislation has gone through the Dáil and is now coming before us and will almost certainly be law within a week or two, I promise you that if you walk down Grafton Street or Liberty Square in Thurles or any street in the country and you stop ten people one after another and ask them if they know what pyramid selling is, the vast majority of them would not have a clue. If you put the question in that way none of them would have any idea what you were talking about. If you said something about chain letters, unless they had immediate and bad experience of it themselves in a commercial sense, they would think back to chain letters that went around in their school days that were more a joke than anything else.
So what is needed here is something far more than the passage of legislation. We need to give the Director of Consumer Affairs the resources to get out and to sell the message to the public that there are unscrupulous business people—I hesitate to use the word "business", they will now be unscrupulous criminals—who engage in this type of practice and who will continue to do so. The mere making of a business practice a criminal offence is not going to stop it, and the courts will deal with people in the best way they know how but there is difficulty over enforcement. People frequently will be too embarrassed to go and report their own failing, because they feel it is a failing if they have been conned and they will feel that the amount is small enough and they will not do anything about it. There is a problem about enforcement and the only real way to deal with this problem is to get out and educate our consumers. It arises in far more areas than this, but this is a particularly cruel way of hitting at vulnerable people. Perhaps the Minister has considered it already. If he has, he may be able to tell me what plans he has to advise people of the dangers in this respect and the fact that it will now be a criminal offence to participate in these schemes. If he has not done that I urge him and beg of him to undertake the type of programme that I have advocated to educate people.
