Remarks by Tánaiste Mary Harney at the‘Conference on the Competition Authority Inquiry into the Professions’on Tuedsday 26 June 2001 in the Radisson Hotel, Stillorgan Co Dublin

Speaking at the official opening of the Conference, the Tánaiste said:

To ensure a fair balance of economic power in society we need:

There has to be a balance between all three. Competition is absolutely essential for a free and open society.

Consumers alone have little power against dominant businesses or vested interests. It can be very difficult for consumers to organize themselves to assert their collective interests. Vigorous and courageous policies in favour of competition go a long way to correct this imbalance.

That is the fundamental approach that I take to competition. It is a matter of fairness and of the correct balance of power.

Some people create a spectre around the word ‘competition’ that is more about predatory, dog-eat-dog behaviour, the so-called ‘law of the jungle’. That’s an entirely misplaced idea for a modern society, one that ignores the regulation and law that we put in place to protect consumers, while allowing competition.

To be able to compete means that one is free to start a business, free to offer services, free to innovate, and free to attract customers with an improved deal, as one sees it. Free to succeed or to fail, indeed. Competition is a touchstone of how free and open we are. It is also a great predictor of how adaptable and dynamic our society will be, as we seek to sustain employment and prosperity.

Not to value and promote competition is indefensible as a public policy position. As a matter of defending a vested interest rather than the public interest, it is explicable, though, in my view, very short-sighted. In today’s globalised economy, the attitude of ‘what we have we hold’ is doomed to fail. This applies to the entire State as much as it does to particular sectional interests.

We know from some rather limited experience in Ireland that competition works for the benefit of consumers, the ordinary people. It delivers lower prices and more services. It is also of strategic importance. The introduction of competition into telecommunications has been excellent for business, for employment and for the national interest.

It could have been done much earlier. We have received a great impetus for this from the EU.

I would challenge anyone to show how the maintenance of protection and state planning for telecommunications could possibly have delivered anything near the benefits we see today in Ireland in our telecoms sector.

The same goes, in spades, for air transport. I do not need to rehearse again the facts about how competition has reduced the costs of journeys to London, Paris and so on. The benefits to hundreds of thousands of ordinary people have been immense, social benefits as well as economic benefits. Thousands of jobs and small businesses in tourism have felt the direct beneficial effects of low-cost access to Ireland.

Isn’t it clear now that the presumption must be in favour of competition? That the burden of proof lies with the opponents of competition to demonstrate that competition would produce worse outcomes? I ask anyone who defends anti-competitive practices to demonstrate how the consumer interest is actually enhanced by the preservation of rules and procedures that reduce competition and effectively favour themselves. The onus to prove the case is on that side, not on those of us who favour competition.

Suppliers of a service should not be able themselves to determine how many suppliers of that service will be allowed. I say this, no matter who they are - professionals, trade unions, craftspeople, even or perhaps most of all, politicians. That is not freedom. That does not signal an open society. It inevitably works against consumers. It stifles innovation. It is not in the public interest.

We need more deregulation. We need to open up more areas of the economy. There are still a lot of barriers to the consumer interest in Ireland. Some of the barriers are still very strong, and have powerful interests defending them. It is in all our interest to remove those barriers.

We must deliver choice and better services to consumers, and to ensure a fair balance of economic power in society. <>And that is the heart of it: fairness and economic justice. No-one can fear that. We should neither take people’s livelihoods away nor should we protect some sectional groups as the expense of everyone else. It is, as I said, a matter of balance for fairness in society. With more competition, we are beginning to get a better balance in Ireland. We must press on.