Sinn Féin’s Supervalu Shocker

Musgraves haven't gone away you know.

Dáil Éireann—where the pressing issues of our time are debated with all the precision of a blindfolded man swinging a sledgehammer in a china shop. Last week’s performance? A gripping exposé on supermarket profits, brought to you by Sinn Féin, a party that apparently believes “fact-checking” is something you do to get a gun licence.

Saturday’s Irish Times had a curious article by the pseudonymous (hate those guys) Cantillon, where he highlighted that three Sinn Féin TDs had claimed in the Dáil that Supervalu was an American-owned company during a debate on inflation and the cost of living crisis.

Now, inflation and the cost of living are a nightmare. Butter costs more than a pint in Temple Bar, and milk is edging toward the same price as that nice Supervalu bottle of red wine you treat yourself to once a month. So yes, by all means, let’s grill the supermarket giants. But if you’re going to storm the Bastille of Ireland’s retail capitalism, maybe—just maybe—find out who actually owns the grocery giant first.

Enter Pearse Doherty, never a man to speak like a normal person, standing tall in the chamber like an avenging angel of retail justice. Stock prices are through the roof! He thundered. Tesco up 30%! United Natural Foods—owners of our very own SuperValu—up 60%! His Sinn Féin comrades, Paul Donnelly and Marie Devine, not to be outdone in a race for economic illiteracy, piled on with triumphant declarations of SuperValu’s soaring profits and their American owners’ “stock price”. Márie Devine exclaimed, “We have seen Tesco's stock prices increase by 30% and SuperValu's stock by nearly 61%, well outpacing prospective market index increase rates".

Who knew Sinn Féin TD Márie Devine was such an expert in prospective market index rates? The sage of the South Inner City, the Oracle of Terenure, says you. Business and financial journalists will be breaking down Devine’s door to interview her next week. I’m sure they’ll ask the deputy what other Irish stocks are outpacing the market index rate values. Hopefully, we can all profit from her knowledge of opaque financial instruments. She’ll be writing articles for the Sunday Business Post and setting up her own hedge fund next - Devine Returns.

There’s just one teensy problem. I was curious about how Sinn Féin concluded that Supervalu was an American-owned entity. As a Cork man who grew up in the constituency where the Supervalu owner has its headquarters, I already knew the answer. Family members even worked for them. But doubting myself, and in fact for a nanosecond believing Doherty, Donnelly and Devine to be correct, I took to searching Google. Which confirmed for me, yes, Supervalu is an Irish company, owned by the Musgrave Group. Google wouldn’t lie? But who might? I then asked ChatGPT and various other AI applications -Who owns Supervalu? They all came back with remarkably similar answers to the one pictured below.

United Natural Foods owns an American supermarket called SuperValu, which has as much to do with Irish SuperValu as a Tesco Ready Meal has with a five-course meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant. The Irish retail giant is owned by the Musgrave Group, a fact that can be discovered in roughly 0.3 seconds via the dark, mysterious art of typing ‘Supervalu Ireland’ into Google. One can imagine the horror of the Sinn Féin TD for Cork South Central, Donnacha O’Laoighre, listening to his three comrades claim that one of the biggest employers in his constituency and one of the largest indigenous employers in the state, with a turnover of €5 billion in 2023 might be American and not founded in Cork back in 1876 by Tom and Stuart Musgrave, two brothers from Leitrim. The Musgrave Group is a wholesaler which distributes to its network of franchised retail brands, which include Centra, Supervalu and Daybreak.

The darkly amusing fact my brief research revealed to me was that, if you click on Supervalu’s “About Us” section, they tell you they are Irish-owned.

But why bother with research when you can just let ChatGPT hallucinate your talking points for you? At this rate, Sinn Féin’s next housing policy will be based on Monopoly board prices, and their healthcare plan will cite Grey’s Anatomy as best healthcare outcomes.