The head of the National Consumer Agency talks to Paul Cullenabout rip-offs and redress
Ireland's latest and most powerful consumer champion is a low-key, determined Kerrywoman who has vowed to rattle the cages of those who stifle competition and rip off the ordinary shopper.
For the past two years, Ann Fitzgerald has headed up the National Consumer Agency (NCA) on an interim basis.
Her period in limbo is set to end within the coming weeks, when the Oireachtas finally passes legislation putting the agency on a statutory basis.
The new body has the potential to dramatically reverse the imbalance of power between consumers and the forces of business and Government. Fitzgerald will exercise wide-ranging new powers to "name and shame" rogue traders and impose on-the-spot fines for breaches of consumer law.
Critics say an independent agency would be less beholden to Government, but Fitzgerald is having none of it. "I'm genuinely comfortable with our set-up. I wouldn't have been comfortable if we were an office of the department, relying on it for our staff. We want to be out there, independent, recruiting our own people. Giving good service, doing our research, making sure everything is grounded in real facts, not hopping up and down."
There is no alternative to a State-funded consumer agency, she says. "You have to get the funding from somewhere to do the research.
"It will be arm's length and this is the most arm's length you can go. You can't give €8.5 million to a voluntary body and just say 'just take it away'."
The NCA will be less "Civil Service-bound, more open" than other bodies in the consumer field, she promises.
"We use different language, we're very direct, and we're prepared to rattle cages."
She says the interim agency has already rattled cages with its proposal for the reform of management companies in apartment blocks, "where we opened a huge mess", and its submission on the energy White Paper, in which it called for a debate on nuclear power.
The "R" word is hard to avoid in relation to consumer issues. In 2005, the report of the Consumer Strategy Group, which Fitzgerald chaired, provided the most comprehensive analysis of the rip-offs perpetrated on Irish consumers, and there's little evidence that much has improved since then.
But part of the problem is that consumers allow themselves to be ripped off, she admits. "It's very hard for anyone to sit down and say 'I'm consciously going to move from one bank or phone company to another'. It takes time and we don't have time. We need to be far more aware that if we took six or seven or eight areas of our financial life and said once a month 'I'm going to look at moving my health insurance or telecoms provider' we could make real savings.
"We have to get over that inertia and make the moving easier and the information more transparent."
A fanatical bridge player and former head of the Irish Association of Investment Managers, Fitzgerald brings considerable analytical skills to the task of representing consumers. She says she wants to scrutinise areas of "major consumer detriment" rather than the price-checking emphasis of the office of the director of consumer affairs, which is being subsumed into the new agency.
Even in its interim form, with just a handful of staff, the agency has managed to score points on behalf of the consumer. It was influential in persuading the Government to abolish the groceries order, for example, and it managed to get the cable company NTL to ease its plans to charge customers extra for not paying by direct debit.