Remember the duty-free sales at Irish airports? Remember what Aer Rianta and Mary O'Rourke promised would happen if they were ended? A combination of the Famine and the Hungry Thirties, with a light dusting of the Great Plague, would be the certain outcome if duty-free was stopped.
It was the classical defence of monopolist power: a protected privilege was seen as a moral right, without which civilisation would collapse. It was also classical monopoly conduct: monopolies expend their energies protecting their monopoly, not attending to their primary function, which in Aer Rianta's case was running airports.
Irish airports have now lost most of their duty-free sales, but I have yet to see a naked pauper with a chalk-drawn begging bowl on the runway in front of him, while a representative of Massey & Son shambles along the echoing airport corridors with a corpse-laden handcart, tolling a bell and crying, "Bring out your dead". The reverse has been the case: with the break-up of the Aer Rianta and the departure of an intrusive, anti-Ryanair Minister, at least two airports are seriously back in the airport business.
It's simple. So why on earth does the Government need an entire policy group to decide on another simple matter - below-cost selling by supermarkets? Probably because politicians dislike forfeiting powers voluntarily, in much the same way the rest of us dislike surrendering our thumbs to a chainsaw, and so they anaesthetise the amputation by getting a group of wise men to announce that, for the good of the patient, the prohibition must go.
The present ban on below-cost selling was introduced in 1987 during the long, dark nadir of public intellect in Irish life, when politics had been haugheyed, debauched and imbecilised, and hypocrisy was formal policy. During the 1980s we reaffirmed the constitutional ban on divorce, added a further ban on abortion, continue to criminalise the sale of condoms, borrowed money to squander on current expenditure, and put the entire workforce of the bankrupt Talbot plant on the State payroll because the factory was in Charles Haughey's constituency.
I actually can't remember who was Taoiseach when the ban on below-cost selling was introduced: being governed alternately by an arrogant crook and an arrogant fool does unfortunate things to the memory. So it was bad enough that such a piece of legislation - one that directly attacks the ability of the poor to shop around to find the cheapest goods - was enacted nearly 20 years ago; but what passes belief is that it is still being enforced. Last year both Dunnes Stores and Tesco were prosecuted for selling below-cost food. Can you believe it? Are we the only country in the world that has an inspectorate of civil servants whose job is to keep prices high?
Naturally, RGDATA, the small shopkeepers' union, is in favour of any government action which appears to protect their position in the market, rather as Aer Rianta wanted the Government to throw its weight around to ensure it didn't have to be efficient. For RGDATA is nervous. The exception to the rule on the maximum area of retail outlet that was made for IKEA in Ballymun is probably scaring the daylights out of RGDATA's members, and their dreams are haunted by vast super-Dunnes and massive super-Tescos spreading like Heathrow terminals across the countryside.
They're right to be scared, if we follow the models of the US, France and Britain, where genuine competition was not encouraged: instead, regional monopolies have been created by vast superstores which kill all small rivals, rather as Sir Alexander Fleming's penicillin-dispensing bacterium cleansed a circular area within its petrie dish of all rival bacterial life.
One of the social and economic consequences of domination by powerful regional monopolies is the death of retail outlets in small communities, and then the death of those communities themselves. Go to any small village in England and France, and you will find shopless desolation. This is not true of most Irish villages, where a vibrant retail trade has been reinforced by the arrival of efficient multiple outlets such as Centra and SuperValu.
My local village recently lost one shop, leaving it with three general purpose grocery shops, including a post office, all of which ensure that the community retains its traditional vibrancy. In a comparable French or English village, there would probably be no such outlets.
Of course small shops cannot compete in terms of price with nuclear-powered monsters such as Walmart - when it comes, and it will - or with Asda. But they do compete with one another, cheek by jowl. And that's the way the new generation of large supermarkets should be: if planning permission is given to one on a certain location, so should it be given to another within walking distance. The prospect of such immediate competition might temper the ambition of those companies seeking to establish the retail equivalents of Fleming's bacillus, where the circumferences of the areas of economic sterility neatly touch.
Competition, but not just in price, is the great selector. In my local village shops, competition is measured not just in price, but in civility, charm, service and those other personal qualities I cannot obtain in a supermarket. These are civilising, humanising virtues that you might declare you can't put a price on; but alas you can, as the creation of monopolistic megastores has shown in other countries.
The answer is simple. No planning permissions for new and major single-supermarket projects anywhere in the countryside - but most of all, please, no more government-appointed, decision-deferring policy groups to decide on the obvious.