A member of the Competition Authority has criticised a Government decision to introduce new regulations for pharmacies without allowing for a period of public debate.
The Irish Pharmaceutical Union has also criticised the new regulations, saying they fail to include measures to keep supermarkets and multinationals from encroaching on existing pharmacies.
It decided at its annual conference yesterday to conduct an intense lobbying campaign to get its concerns met.
Regulations abolished in January had meant nobody could set up a pharmacy filling medical card prescriptions without permission from a health board.
The health board had to take into account the effect which a new pharmacy would have on existing pharmacies, even in the next town.
These restrictions, which had been criticised as anti-competitive by the Competition Authority, have been left out of the new regulations. The new regulations concentrate on quality issues, stipulating, for instance, that a pharmacy has to be under the direct control of a pharmacist and must have an area in which consultation and counselling can be provided in private.
The decision to introduce new regulations was communicated to the IPU on Friday evening in advance of its annual conference in Tullamore.
Yesterday, Ms Isolde Goggin, a member of the Competition Authority, said the new regulations were an improvement on what had been in place before. But she had concerns that rather than publish draft regulations and having them debated in public, the Government simply "sent them to the IPU". The OECD had last year recommended transparency in the area of regulation and the Government approach had gone against the spirit of that recommendation, she said.
Ms Goggin is also a member of the High Level Group on Regulation, which is monitoring the implementation of the OECD recommendations on regulation in a number of sectors including pharmacy.
The president of the IPU, Mr Richard Collis, said yesterday he welcomed the reintroduction of regulation by the Government. However the new regulations would "limit choice to consumers" by allowing supermarkets to open pharmacies to the deteriment of independent local pharmacies.
It remained the case since January that anyone could come in from Europe and open a pharmacy here but regulation in Europe meant we could not do the same there.
During the election campaign, the IPU will lobby for a change in the regulations and will then decide whether it needed to take industrial action, he said.
Under the old regulations, about 30 applications to establish pharmacies were rejected.
The best known example was that of Knock in Co Mayo.
The IPU was outraged when, at the end of January, the Minister for Health and Children, Mr Martin, abolished the regulations despite the fact that they were still being considered by a review group.
The review group, which has been sitting for some months, will continue its work.