THE outgoing members of Mayo County Council may have taken some satisfaction in seeing one of its old foes finally getting its knuckles rapped in the Dublin courts last week. Eir, surely by a distance the most reviled public entity in the country, was labelled ‘a disgrace’ by the judge in finding that it had warned its staff against giving a statutory fair break to complaining customers.
It’s three years since Mayo County Council, on foot of a torrent of complaints regarding Eir’s customer service, summoned the company to hear at firsthand the endless list of grievances. There followed the usual honeyed words and smooth assurances that the sins of the past were in the past and that, going forward, Eir had turned over a new leaf.
But the zeal for reformation did not last long. Its unenviable position at the foot of the league table of shabby levels of customer care rarely changed. Its total disregard for its customers and their complaints remained legendary. And there was very little anyone could do to force an uptick in service.
Until last week, that is, when the regulator, Com Reg, its patience exhausted, took a case against Eir at Dublin District Court. The judge went on to convict Eir on multiple breaches of the law over its failure to acknowledge legitimate customer complaints or to meet its legal obligation for a ten-day response.
Most damning was the production of the company training manual for customer service staff in which, underlined in bold type, was the explicit directive that ‘any agent found to be providing any customer with the company complaints webpage details would be subject to disciplinary action’.
At times like this, it is often instructive to take a recap of the chequered history of Eir.
Eir was first conceived in 1999 when the then government decided to privatise what had been Telecom Éireann. It was, in retrospect, an outrageous con job; the State would sell a publicly owned asset back to the people who owned it in the first place, the plain people of Ireland. The bait was that it was the chance for Seán and Maura Citizen to become part of the investor class; it was a shortcut to becoming millionaires.
By launch day, half a million sober citizens had been persuaded to beg, borrow, cadge or commit their life savings to the cause. The government made six billion punts, the currency of the time, on the deal.
Within a few months, the share price had collapsed and Seán and Maura were left holding a piece of embossed but worthless paper. There were ructions in the Dáil; accused of defrauding the public, the government pleaded that it could not be blamed if people took a risk on making big money.
Soon, Eir, once valued at €10 billion, was sold off to Tony O’Reilly for €3 billion. In that bizarre sleight of hand peculiar to high finance, the new owners were not even required to put their hands in their pocket – the purchase price was funded by loading it on to the company debt (a stunt familiar to long suffering Manchester United fans when the Glazer Brothers ‘bought’ the club).
There followed a succession of quick sales, each new owner simply piling on more debt and treating the company like an ATM machine. The current owners of Eir are a French billionaire and two New York hedge funds. Over the past five years, they have rewarded themselves with €1.85 billion in dividends, while the company debt has gone up by €3 billion.
They are unlikely to be worried by the complaints of Irish customers, the censure of an Irish judge, or the paltry fines which the court was limited to impose.
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