RETAIL MINISTER NEALE Richmond says he is hopeful that non-food essentials will come down in price.

Tesco yesterday lowered prices on 700 products, which Richmond believes should include other “important things” like toiletries, nappies and baby wipes.

“They’re really important and people don’t have a choice there,” he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.

In response to the news from Tesco, a spokesperson for Lidl said the company carries out “weekly price checks on Lidl products versus competitors”. 

Aldi’s group managing director Niall O’Connor said the supermarket’s prices are “already lower on comparable products”. 

Richmond echoed sentiments by Michael McGrath yesterday in which the Finance Minister said it was “only a matter of time” before other grocery providers reduce prices.

“Every time this has happened before we’ve seen other supermarkets follow suit,” he said.

“We saw it a couple weeks ago with the prices of bread, milk and butter.”

New figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) showed that the annual rate of inflation slowed to 6.6% in May, compared to 7.2% in April.

This is the twentieth straight month where the annual increase in consumer prices has been at least 5.0%

In what Richmond described as a “very frank” meeting with retailers, they were told to make reductions “where input costs had gone down”.

“We got that guaranteed from all the large multiples, certainly where there’s room to be made with the own brand goods, but particularly the staple goods.”

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“Transparency”

The Retail Minister says he “spends every Tuesday going to five different supermarkets in my own constituency, analysing the change in price of milk,l bread and other products”.

He said transparency is a matter for the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, which Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney met with last week.

Opposition parties have criticised a lack of government intervention on grocery prices, but Richmond says he would “welcome” legislation on transparency. 

“The Labour Party have told us they’re going to present legislation on this and they haven’t actually presented it,” he said.

“You can talk about it but if they want to present the legislation, we will look at it.”