When the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) publishes its annual helpline report every spring, the companies most complained about typically take up most of the headlines.
And so it was this year.
When the top (or should that be bottom?) 10 were revealed last week, regular readers of this page will have been entirely unsurprised.
We learned that Ryanair was the most complained about company in Ireland in 2025, finally making it to Number 1 following silver and bronze finishes in 2024 and 2023.
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In like a bullet at number 2 this year was Rathwood, the Carlow-based home and garden company that has caused many readers considerable upset over the last year or so.
Also no strangers to the list were Currys, Sky and Eir, who rounded out the top five, while Harvey Norman, Aer Lingus, Lidl, Virgin Media and Vodafone were the other companies that featured in the top 10.
Again.
But while the companies which attracted the most complaints attracted the most attention, the helpline report contains a whole lot more information about where we are when it comes to customer care – and just how badly treated too many Irish consumers are if and when things go wrong.
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All told, well over 40,000 people made contact with the consumer watchdog last year, with faulty goods and services topping the list of concerns in the country for the fifth consecutive year.
Consumers were recorded as having spent an average of €6,292 on the products or services that had prompted them to make contact with the CCPC, with the biggest driver of calls from motorists, with 5,827 contacts connected to cars.
Just under 3,000 consumers were concerned about home-building or improvements, with an average spend of €14,597 recorded in that space.
Along with information about how and why people contacted the helplines and the damage done by companies, the CCPC did something new in their report this year – it started following up with consumers who had made contact to find out what happened next.
The idea was to see what impact the knowledge its helpline operators were able to share with consumers had on the outcome of the complaints that people were making.
It started gathering the real-life stories of what happened when consumers put their rights to work, or at least tried to put those rights to work. The project is ongoing and more results will be published in future, but the snapshot the current report provides makes for interesting if mildly depressing reading.
CCPC researchers checked in with 1,248 consumers at least four weeks after they had contacted the helplines.
The good news was that 96 per cent of the people they spoke to said they had subsequently got in touch with the trader in an effort to resolve whatever issues they had using whatever information they had been given by the CCPC.
As part of its report, it documented some case studies.
First there was Mike (This is not his real name. At the risk of stating the obvious, none of the names that follow are actual consumers’ names).
Mike placed an order with an unnamed food delivery company and was less than pleased when he received another customer’s order. He contacted the trader immediately through their app and email and sent them the receipt with the other customer’s name as evidence. Despite contacting them numerous times, the food delivery company refused to issue a refund.
So Mike contacted the CCPC and was given information on his rights and options, including the Small Claims Procedure. He initiated a claim with the Small Claims Court, after which the trader accepted the claim in full and provided a refund, removing the need for a court date.
We don’t know what happened to the other customer, who presumably got Mike’s food.
Then there was Ali. She bought toy bricks from a toy shop for her child and was less than pleased when she subsequently discovered some pieces were missing. The toy shop told her to contact the manufacturer and sent her away. After she contacted the CCPC helpline for advice, she was told her contract was with the trader and not the manufacturer, and it was the trader who had the responsibility for dealing with the issue. She wrote a formal complaint to the trader and got her money back.
Peadar bought clothes online worth over €300. The order never arrived. The trader initially offered a refund but then said that the items had been delivered and that no refund would be offered. Peadar called the CCPC helpline to find out his rights and after making a formal complaint to the trader, he received a refund.
Aisling rented a car, and after she dropped it back her credit card was charged over €100 for tyre damage. This wasn’t mentioned in the check-out document when she returned the vehicle. Aisling was canny and had taken photos of the car before her journey, and those pictures clearly showed the damage existed before the rental.
Despite this, the trader insisted the charge would stand.
The CCPC advised Aisling to complain to the trader and to also seek a chargeback from her bank. She decided to pursue a chargeback, and was successful.
These case studies had positive outcomes, but not all of those who contacted the CCPC and were subsequently contacted as part of the new research had such happy endings to their stories.
A total of 43 per cent of those who had their stories revisited by the CCPC said the issue they had was resolved, but 41 per cent said the problems were ongoing several weeks after they had begun the process of seeking resolution.
Just over half of those the CCPC spoke to said they found it difficult to get in touch with the traders in question, with 26 per cent saying they had contacted the trader between five and nine times, 20 per cent said they had to contact the companies between 10 and 19 times and a wearying 15 per cent telling the researchers they had contacted the trader more than 20 times.
‘We need much more significant financial penalties that companies are going to have to face if they don’t have their customer service systems in order. Reputational damage is certainly a deterrent, but it’s not sufficient’
— Grainne Griffin, CCPC
You can almost see the steam coming out of their ears.
Grainne Griffin, the CCPC’s director of communications, was instrumental in setting up the new line of research which will, over time, paint a crystal-clear picture of the state of customer care in Ireland.
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“We wanted to explore exactly how powerful are consumer rights when you put them into action, and if there are any barriers that are stopping consumers from getting their rights realised,” she says.
One of the things the CCPC was particularly interested in looking at was whether or not increased digitalisation and automation of customer service was contributing to a worsening of customer outcomes.
There is an assumption that this is the case, and we have heard consumers say many times that the particular problem they had was, they couldn’t get a human being to help them. We have even said that ourselves at times.
It turns out that that may not have been the problem at all.
“It is at a very early stage, but so far what we can see, for example: there isn’t a big difference between customers who are contacting companies through email or digital channels compared to those who are speaking to a real person over the phone,” Griffin says.
“In fact, there is feedback from consumers saying that what really matters in terms of getting a resolution is how effective the customer service system is. We hear from consumers telling us that, yes, they spoke to a person, but they had to call back multiple times, and it was a different person every time – and the person didn’t have the authority to resolve the issue.”
She says people have been “promised callbacks that never happened, so essentially consumers were being sent round in circles. On the other hand, you can see some companies that have automated or digital systems to handle consumer complaints that were very efficient and resolved things and issued refunds really quickly, leading to quite a positive consumer experience.”
Griffin says people come to the CCPC “at different points in their journey – some people are potentially a bit hesitant to complain or they like to be really well informed before they do complain, and so they’ll come to us first before they’ve raised anything with the company to know what their rights are. Other consumers come to us because they are banging their head against the wall and they’ve been trying and trying, and they’re looking for something extra that they can go back with."
The CCPC also looked at particular companies that are particularly poor when it comes to customer care to see whether they could identify systemic failures.
She says the number of consumers who say it’s difficult to contact a trader is “quite shocking and unacceptable”.
She points out that while the Consumer Rights Act “is not a customer service manual [and] doesn’t tell a business how quickly they have to answer the phone or exactly how timely their email responses need to be, it does set out in black and white that companies have to respond to faulty goods and to faulty service issues and put them right, so any barriers to that ultimately can be a breach of the law”.
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She suggests a key question that has to be asked is whether there is a systematic failure within the customer service system, or whether a company is simply “not motivated to put a really solid customer service system in place”. She expresses the view that there should be consequences for companies if they make a decision not to put good customer service systems in place.
“The CCPC takes a lot of enforcement action on the back of consumer complaints – they are a really valuable source of intel,” Griffin says.
She points out, however, that sometimes the way things are set up make it harder to hold miscreants to account.
“When we go to the District Court, the way the system works is that a sample case is usually brought forward and considered by the judge as an individual incident and therefore the penalty that is available to the judge and the one that is applied is appropriate to the District Court, and it is usually a €1000 donation to the poor box. But when you look at companies of this scale, that isn’t an effective deterrent.
“We need much more significant financial penalties that companies are going to have to face if they don’t have their customer service systems in order. Reputational damage is certainly a deterrent, but it’s not sufficient – we need to back it up with financial penalties so that companies really feel it where it hurts, so that they are properly motivated to treat consumers well and to be fully accountable for the goods and services that they provide.”
There are also impediments when it comes to the Small Claims Court. She says that when it works, “it works brilliantly, and it can be a really affordable, timely and efficient solution for a consumer”, but the issue is that you cannot take a case to the Small Claims Court if the amount involved tops €2,000.
“Far too many consumers are simply priced out, and the €2,000 threshold is no longer enough,” she says. “A family holiday, any form of car, a suite of furniture, a laptop – you can point to so many examples of what are common purchases that will easily fall outside of the threshold for the Small Claims Court.”
The Programme for Government contained a commitment for changes to lift the limits but, Griffin says, “it needs to happen as a matter of urgency if people are going to actually have effective access to redress. We have looked at numbers like €8,000 in the past because we are also conscious that the rules are not revised all that often, so whatever number we do pick has to be future-proofed – it has to be something that will last for a period of time and keep pace with inflation so that it will continue to serve consumers into the future as well as in the here and now.”
Generally speaking, the CCPC is not empowered to advocate on behalf of individual consumers, but what it can do is point them in the direction of other bodies that might be able to intervene more directly in particular cases. According to its report, these are the ones it most commonly refers consumers to. ccpc.ie
The Small Claims Court allows consumers to resolve certain disputes with businesses through the District Court, without having to engage the services of a solicitor. The Court deals with claims up to the value of €2,000. It costs €25 to make a claim. courts.ie
SIMI (Society of the Irish Motor Industry) operates a consumer complaints and arbitration service dealing with used cars, repairs and services purchased from its members. simi.ie
When a consumer contacts the CCPC about an issue with a business based outside Ireland but within the EU, UK, Iceland or Norway, it may refer them to the European Consumer Centre Ireland. The CCPC is the body designated to host the ECCI, which supports consumers with cross-border issues and complaints and operates a dispute-resolution service for consumers and traders based in different EU countries, Iceland, and Norway. eccireland.ie
The Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) handles consumer complaints about telecommunications, radio communications, broadcasting transmission, premium rate services and the postal sector in Ireland. comreg.ie
Government departments and agencies have different responsibilities. The CCPC refers consumers to the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications for issues regarding the household waste sector and the Deposit Return Scheme, for example. Other queries are directed to the relevant departments or agencies, where appropriate. www.gov.ie
The Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) supports consumers with questions or complaints about energy and water. cru.ie
Consumers are often referred to the Central Bank when they contact the CCPC in relation to a faulty car purchased via hire purchase. centralbank.ie
The Companies Registration Office (CRO) holds all public statutory information on Irish companies and business names. Consumers are referred here if they need information about a company, such as its status or registered office. cro.ie
The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) is responsible for enforcing EU rules on flights when it comes to delays, cancellations and compensation. iaa.ie
An Garda Síochána deal with all matters relating to fraud, scams and other criminal activity. garda.ie
