Food Prices
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-23
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Neale Richmond (FG), Dublin Rathdown

I am grateful to the Deputy for raising this issue, one that I have absolute familiarity with having previously been a Minister of State in the Department with responsibility for retail during a period when we had 16.9% grocery inflation on the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which massively increased food and energy prices across western Europe. Global inflation will see grocery prices increase. At the time, we would have seen grocery stores reduce their prices on about 700 products in the interim but there was a range of different proposals suggested. The opportunity I have this afternoon, given the directness of the points raised by Deputy Daly, is to outline the existing situation.
The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment is responsible for policy in relation to competition and consumer protection. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, CCPC, is the independent statutory body responsible for enforcing competition law and consumer protection legislation. The CCPC is not a price-monitoring or price-regulating body. The collection, compilation and publication of official price data is a statutory function of the Central Statistics Office.
Businesses in Ireland are generally free to set their own prices, provided they do so independently and in compliance with competition and consumer protection law. The CCPC has engaged with public concerns about grocery prices within its existing remit. In August 2025, it published an updated high-level analysis of the Irish grocery retail sector, updating its 2023 work. This analysis examined market concentration, entry and expansion, national and international price trends, and the profitability of major grocery retailers.
The CCPC concluded that while grocery prices have risen significantly since 2021, there is no evidence of a failure of competition or of excessive pricing in the sector. The CCPC plays an active and enforcement-focused role in protecting consumers. It enforces competition and consumer protection law across the economy, including in the retail and grocery sectors, and takes action, for example, where traders mislead consumers, fail to display prices correctly, or breach pricing transparency requirements. This includes inspections, prosecutions and enforcement actions in the grocery and wider retail sectors. In parallel, the CCPC protects consumers by preventing anti-competitive outcomes that could lead to higher prices or reduced choice, including in rural areas. For example, the CCPC approved a proposed supermarket acquisition by Tesco only after the company agreed to divest an outlet in Oranmore, protecting local competition in Galway.
The Central Statistics Office continues to publish detailed and independently-verified data through the consumer price index, including on food and drink prices. This data provides a transparent and authoritative basis for understanding price movements across the wider economy.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-23/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-23