Consumers have benefited from the abolition of the Groceries Order, the Competition Authority insisted yesterday, dismissing media reports to the contrary.

Authority chairman Bill Prasifka said media reports to the effect that some food prices had risen by 16 per cent were based on an incomplete subset of food items. He added that any judgment on the effect of the order's abolition required a "more robust" measure of data.

Reports that food prices have "soared" since the abolition of the Groceries Order are not borne out by the official data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), which show that, in fact, the opposite is the case", Mr Prasifka said in a statement.

Since the abolition of the Groceries Order in March last year, the CSO's consumer price index, which measures inflation in the economy, has increased by 2.8 per cent. The overall basket of grocery goods has decreased by 0.6 per cent.

"Since April 2006, CSO figures show that prices of items perviously covered by the Groceries Order have fallen by 1.5 per cent to their lowest level since December 2002," said Mr Prasifka. "Over that same period, prices of items that were never covered by the Groceries Order such as fresh meat, vegetables and fish have risen by 2.3 per cent."

"What the 16 per cent does is selectively choose from items within those baskets. You could choose a basket of a tin of grapefruit or a tin of beans and get any figure you want," Mr Prasifka said yesterday.

The Competition Authority said the figures cited by the Irish Examinersurvey were based on a sub-set of the grocery items checked by the CSO, containing 73 products. "But, in fact, the basket of consumer goods and services used to calculate the monthly inflation figure comprises a total of 613 items, Some items are further broken down into different varieties and, in total, over 1,040 different varieties are included in the basket," the authority said.

The Groceries Order was introduced in 1987.