Weekend Consumer News Short Stack
Just a few short comments for the weekend.
- ValueIreland.com Housekeeping – We think we’ve been having problems with our e-mail recently, but it’s only come to light on Wednesday. We do reply to all e-mails and phone messages received within 48hours, and have resent some that we thought didn’t get through. So, if you’ve been expecting an e-mail response from us, but haven’t received one, please get back to us.
- Health Insurance Price Rises – This should have gone in last week, but better late than never. The VHI are increasing their price rises by 23% in 2009, and Quinn Healthcare are raising theirs by 16%. Hibernian Healthcare on the other hand will give you a 10% discount and hold that price for 2009 if you change to them on either December 21st or 30th. And don’t forget, despite what your current insurer might lead you to believe, there’s no problem in moving from one company to another – you will not lose cover. Hibernian actually make it easy for you with template cancellation letters for either Quinn or the VHI.
- Explain Yourselves – Seems that that’s the only solution that this government, and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment in their feigned attempts to address the higher prices in Ireland compared to elsewhere. The grocery multiples have already been called in (without much success as we’ve seen), and now it looks like the mouthful that is the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources is getting in on the act by calling in the ESB to find out why we have the highest electricity costs in Europe. Not sure much will come from this – if the regulator with the power (pardon the pun) only insists on a 1% reduction in tariffs, a Dail committee isn’t going to get too far.
- Avoid Transport Price Rises – In the past week it has been announced that Dublin Bus and Irish Rail will be increasing their fares early in 2009 because of a fall in passenger numbers. This post from early in 2008 gives you a suggestion on how you might avoid these price rises, at least for a while. Unsurprisingly, there’s no details on the respective websites that I can find, so if we don’t know which tickets are going up by what amount, we’re not going to know which tickets to buy now to beat the rise.
- Fine Gael Launching a thousand rip offs – We had Leo Varadkar give us his Top Tips for Irish Consumers yesterday, and on Tuesday last he was quoted in the Dail as saying he and Fine Gael will be relauching their “Rip Off Ireland” campaign “in the coming weeks”. This will be the second relauch within 12 months. I see that they have redesigned their RipOff.ie website in the past few months (though I’m not sure where the www.bublin.eu links are coming from on some of the pages). They would do well reviewing some of the site contents, particularly on their Links page – references to the ODCA and “interim NCA” are out of date, as are links to the dearly departed ShoppingBill.com and RipOffIreland.org.
Have a great weekend!
