We are now clearly in the runup to a general election. In the main, this may well turn out to have been the best Government in the history of the State, but they have done some things badly and some not at all.

One of the serious omissions has been the back-tracking on the commitment to have a framework for the relationship governing supermarkets and suppliers. Earlier in the week, the BBC’s Panorama carried out a truly devastating survey of Tesco’s mistreatment of its suppliers.

The stories will have had a familiar ring to many suppliers here.

So what has been dismantled and what should go in its place?

What has been dismantled is clear – a whole regulatory framework surrounding the liquid milk sector.

This approach has caused significant income drops for traditional liquid milk suppliers in the old Dublin and Cork district milk board areas, but it has caused absolute devastation in Britain. Since the abolition of the marketing boards in the 1980s, British dairy farmer numbers have plummeted and families have buckled under financial and emotional pressure.

During the Christmas period in 2013, the same feature was seen in the vegetable market here in Ireland. Vegetables were sold (if that is the right word) at giveaway prices, purely to entice shoppers into certain stores.

There was uproar among farmers and mumblings of support from politicians, but to call a spade a spade, if farmers – IFA members rather than the organisation itself – had not threatened direct action, the same would inevitably have happened during the Christmas period that has just passed.

I have little doubt that the same undercurrent of possible direct action by farmers is at least partly responsible for the continuing gap between some home-produced products and their imported counterparts in the UK.

The conventional classical economist seems to lack the facility to actually distinguish between when a market functions normally – ie, on the basis of equal strength between buyers and sellers – and when distortions are present because of the strength of one participant relative to the other.

We have dismantled an entire regulatory apparatus of centrally set prices related to costs of production and have also removed the ban on below-cost selling.

Despite the promises, nothing has been put in their place.

It is not sensible that reliance for a livelihood has to be placed on threats of subterranean activity.