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He did feel ‘a bit of imposter syndrome’ who is now the lotto regulator, and but what stood to him was his ‘ability to adapt to new environments’, first I was the only person from Vivian Ryan, who is senior at the Consumer Protection Commission, honed as a Trinity Freshman in 1983: ‘I was the only person from the 90 or so students in my year at 90 or so students in my year at school in Laois to go to and John Evans, now a director at ComReg - these were all talented Trinity alumni.’ school in Laois to go to Trinity and Trinity and I’d no real I’d no real idea what to expect. I guess idea what to expect It was an exciting time to be shaping competition policy. The then Minister I was a bit intimidated at first – there were students whose parents had houses in for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, London and went skiing at Christmas, which was Mary Harney had got cross party agreement very far from my farming background – but I’m reasonably on strengthening competition law and making merger good at reading signals and understanding people and their law independent and taking ministers out of decisions. interests. I found I enjoyed being around different people At their first meeting, she gave him a piece of advice: ‘She and adapting to new environments.’ said “please don’t turn this into a think tank – it has to do practical things”. She’s an astute observer of people, Mary - I As an undergraduate, he threw himself into different think I was tending towards creating a thinktank and that student activities – ‘running SU elections, chairing stopped me. It’s something I’ve seen in other people who Amnesty International and what was then Lesbian and Gay are good mentors – they give just one piece of advice which Soc, and getting involved with DUBES [Dublin University sticks in the mind.’ Business and Economics Society]’. Academically his time was transformative because his dyslexia, undiagnosed in school, was tackled by Professor John O’Hagan. ‘I started off studying maths and economics and I was getting first class honours in maths but 2.2 in economics and John thought something wasn’t adding up, so he got me to write an essay every week for two terms and that taught me how to absorb information and put an argument together.’ The effect was dramatic: Fingleton gave up maths, got Schols in Economics, founded the seminal Student Economic Review He helped introduce the Irish Competition Act in 2002 and recalls taking a personal interest in shaking up estate agents’ commissions: ‘They were all on 2% commission. Property prices were going up fivefold and agents’ fees at the same rate - it wasn’t obvious that what they were doing had got more valuable so I encouraged people to shop around. When I sold my house in Dublin in 2006, I got different price offers from estate agents, which wouldn’t have happened a few years earlier.’ (celebrating its 35th anniversary this year) and embarked on an academic career. The most valuable lesson he learnt was ‘how politics and public opinion interact with industry when you’re trying to Like many of his peers, he headed to the UK on graduation but where his friends went straight into banking or management consultancy, he did a PhD in Nuffield College, Oxford – ‘it was on intermediation, bringing buyers and sellers together – quite dry!’ He lectured in the London School of Economics before returning to Trinity as a lecturer in the Department of Economics in 1991. Getting involved with the Centre for Economic Policy Research ‘plugged me make changes’ and he applied this to his next role as Chief Executive of the Office of Fair Trading in the UK from 2005 to 2012. ‘We took on a lot of big businesses on competition law offences, which hadn’t been used before, and then came the really difficult set of issues around the financial crisis and the collapse of the banking system. I recall for the merger of Lloyds and HBOS, the government having to amend competition law to bypass independent merger control’. back into the British and European research network; I co- wrote a book on competition policy in Eastern Europe. I was still doing a lot of theory, but getting very interested in the policy end and that’s what led me to the Competition Authority [in Ireland].’ He worked well with Peter Mandelson as Secretary of State for Business, but when the coalition government came in ‘there were two years of constant debates and fighting with politicians about the shape of competition law and there was a lot of business push back. I felt it was important from The Authority was small, by later standards, but preparing to expand – Fingleton’s first job was ‘to hire about 15 people, which was brilliant because I got to shape the agency and I took on some very dynamic people, including Carol Boate, a public service point of view that we shape the law so I stayed on until the legislation was formed. I was asked to stay and run the new merged agency, but I’d done seven years at that stage, which was long enough.’
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He stepped down in summer of 2012 and for six months worked ‘as a sort of economic policy adviser to David Cameron’s government’. Then he set up his own consultancy, Fingleton, advising businesses on complex regulatory and competition issues, from start-ups to multinationals. ‘I didn’t set out to grow the business but you hire, and now we’re about 20 people. It’s a really outstanding group and includes a few Trinity alumni, including Dermot Nolan, who was a scholar the year behind me and ran the energy regulator in Ireland and then Ofgem, the UK energy regulator.’ They focus on UK regulatory issues, though they have advised on regulatory issues in Ireland. Thus far, Brexit has been ‘very slow to unfold, in terms of impact on competition regulation within the UK. A lot of the issues affecting businesses are bureaucratic rather than big regulatory decisions. But what has changed is that the UK has become a strong global competition agency. Previously cases involving, say, Microsoft or Facebook were dealt with by the European Commission or a member state agency on behalf of the rest, but now, if you’ve got a big global merger, you need approval from the Americans, the Europeans, the Chinese and the British. So the UK has become a big force, and while that’s not necessarily great for business generally, it has been good for my business because we’re trying to help people navigate that.’ He sits on the board of UK Research and Innovate ‘which funds academic research and business innovation, a bit like Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council’. His CBE is for ‘services to the economy and to innovation’. He lives and works in London but gets back to Laois frequently to visit family and to cycle – ‘I cycle, cook, and garden – very conventional middle age pursuits!’ His prognosis for the coming year? ‘A possible new COVID variant could create uncertainty. Other than that, I think we’ll see a lot of focus on accelerating digital change and trying to address problems around technology.’ Interestingly, he doesn’t think competition policy can solve all our tech problems: ‘People put faith in competition because competition tools are tough and punitive. But disinformation, fake news and addiction are much bigger problems than monopolies and much more difficult to solve. It’s not clear to me that if you broke up Facebook, for example, that you would address these issues – you would just have multiple companies doing this. We need to think about different regulatory models and approaches to this.’
