Media mergers bill waits turn on the A list

Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte is presumably fed up by now of being asked when the Government's long-promised Consumer and Competition Bill – dealing in part with media mergers – will emerge. So Teleprinter asked Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton instead.

“It’s on the A list for publication before the end of this session. That’s the target to which we are working,” the Minister said.

"Obviously it's a complex Bill. There's the media mergers piece, there's the regulation of the retail trade piece and then there's the merger of the bodies [the Competition Authority and the National Consumer Agency], so there's a lot of drafting to be done, but I'm satisfied that good progress is being made."

Media matters only take up eight of the circa 130 heads of the Bill, which has been stuck in a legislative backlog for two years. For media watchers, however, the wait is even longer than that: the legislation is expected to give effect to recommendations made by the Report of the Advisory Group on Media Mergers some five years ago.