• Conor Pope – Pricewatch, The Irish Times, Monday
• Gareth Naughton – The Sunday Tribune, Sunday
• Charlie Weston – The Irish Independent, Tuesday
• Tina Leonard – The Irish Independent (Smart Consumer), Thursday
• Ben Dunne – The Irish Sun, Saturday
• Dermott Jewell – The Irish News of the World, Sunday
• Niall Brady & John Cradden – The Sunday Times, Sunday
• Kathleen Barrington – The Sunday Business Post, Sunday
• Louise McBride – The Sunday Independent, Sunday
• Eddie Hobbs – The Irish Daily Star, Thursday

 Am I missing anyone else? I don’t believe there is anyone specifically covering this kind of thing in The Irish Examiner. Not sure about the Irish Daily Mail.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• October 31, 2008 -- Insurance You Don’t Need?
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• September 29, 2008 -- Top Tips for Saving Money

I have just returned from a shopping expedition with my wife and 2 daughters in Dublin city centre. My daughters are very fond of H+M and I also found 3 pairs of trousers that I liked. The Sterling price of the trousers per pair was £19.99 and the Euro price was €29.99. I’m absolutely flabbergasted by the extortionate exchange rate that is continually used by H+M since the Euro is now trading at 0.876397 which gives these trousers a Euro price of €22.80 if the true exchange rate were used. This exchange rate has been hovering around the 0.87 to 0.89 mark for some time.

A simple question must be asked. Why are H+M over charging the already hard pressed Irish consumer a whopping 32% more than their English counterparts? The answer I suspect is because they can. To add further insult, that wouldn’t take Sterling cash ( which I didn’t have anyway) for the Sterling price shown on the price tag. This just proves that it’s a carefully orchestrated pricing policy.

Any ideas on how to have this criminal practice highlighted would be appreciated.

A common topic from ValueIreland.com readers, but this reader has answered his own question – these shops charge these prices because they can, and because unfortunately there are still Irish consumers out there who’ll pay what’s asked unquestioningly.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• July 7, 2009 -- Argos – more sterling to euro conversion issues
• July 7, 2009 -- Sterling to Euro price conversion issue – again
• May 19, 2009 -- Sterling to Euro conversion rip off again

Unfortunately, no one has submitted any e-mail addresses yet – the emailtheceo.ie website is looking bare. Not even the readers who originally suggested e-mailing CEOs as being a valid route of problem escalation for consumers have passed on any addresses.

So, if you have these contact details, you can pass them on to me here via the Contact Page, and I’ll make them available for any Irish consumers that want (or need) to contact them to escalate any customer support issues.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• September 28, 2009 -- emailtheceo.ie – privacy guaranteed
• September 28, 2009 -- emailtheceo.ie – Taking customer complaints to the top
• September 22, 2009 -- E-mail the CEO – a new ValueIreland.com consumer resource

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Ireland has made what should be one of the most significant and mature decisions in our history by voting Yes in Lisbon Treaty referendum. I wonder is it beyond all of us to make one more conscious decision and spend what little disposable income we may have to boost this economy.

It is quite simple. All we do is purchase goods that are either produced in Ireland or if they are not produced here then distributed by Irish suppliers. A simple explanation of where we have come from to where we are now. Ireland was a country with very low unemployment with a reasonable public service and higher prices than other EU countries. Now Ireland is a country with very high unemployment with the prospect of a very poor public service and retail prices comparable with 1984. Yet we still have costs comparable with 2004.

Yes we had higher prices but they were as a direct result of higher employment. Now we have lower prices and higher unemployment. Fewer goods are being purchased from Irish suppliers and larger quantities are being brought in from the UK and Europe. This has forced Irish suppliers to reduce staff in order to compete on price with the UK and European suppliers. This money is going out of this economy and into the UK and European economies. We are not talking about small money but millions upon millions of Euro lost to other economies that should be spent in Ireland.

We will all pay a higher price than we paid for our goods when we find a reduction in vital services such as health care, policing, education etc. etc. Is this what we want for our children’s future. We can change this by demanding Irish based companies are supported by each and every person living in Ireland. If this was our attitude over the last 10 years we would possibly not be in recession. We would not be looking at ridiculously high costs in the public sector or massive job losses in the private sector. We can change this economy if we are brave enough to support Irish based companies and know our money is being kept in this economy and not supporting other economies.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• October 26, 2009 -- Come to Ireland on holidays, and see this? Wow! That’s harsh!
• September 9, 2009 -- Spot the Irish Food in the Irish Food promotion
• June 29, 2009 -- Buy Irish – something to think about

I wrote this post last week following some prompting from a ValueIreland.com reader, and based on some thoughts of my own. Given yesterdays events in Kilkenny, tiger kidnappings becomes topical again.

And just before I get into this post, regular readers are probably familiar that I’m quite keen on my conspiracy theories, but I’m not necessarily trying to build one in this article.

Having said that, I really really can’t grasp why we’re still seeing so called “Tiger Kidnappings” in this country.

Personally, I’m fully convinced that at least one recent tiger kidnapping (and fairly large) and robbery was an inside job, but you have to think that with the levels of technology and security available to banks these days, that a fool proof way of preventing these thefts could be developed.

Now, banks have put procedures in place in the last year or so that are supposed to help in these tiger kidnapping situations, but as this article highlights there’s not a whole lot can be done if the staff in question don’t actually follow the guidelines put in place.

Bank management ignored alert guidelines, which were drawn up by all of the financial institutions with the gardai and the Department of Justice, to protect the hostages taken in a tiger kidnap and help end the spate of similar robberies.

Reacting to this, Charlie Flanagan of Fine Gael completely pointlessly had this to say:

Fine Gael’s justice spokesman has said internal security staff at Bank of Ireland should consider their positions if they are unwilling to co-operate with agreed procedures between themselves and the Gardai.

For someone who expects to be part of a Government in the near future that will probably still have these robberies to address and deal with, shouldn’t this really have read:

Fine Gael’s justice spokesman has said that Bank of Ireland management should review the positions of their internal security staff at the bank if they are unwilling to co-operate with agreed procedures between themselves and the Gardai. Mr. Flanagan said that failure to fulfill contracted paid duties as part of their employment should result in the dismissal of such staff.

Simple as – you don’t do your job, you get fired.

Back in December, the Sunday Business Post published this interesting article on the phenomenon – How can Gardai tame the tiger kidnappings?

many instances of tiger kidnapping have occurred throughout the world – with Ireland, Britain and Belgium being the more likely locations for such a crime. There are at least 30 tiger kidnappings a year in Ireland and most are perpetrated against the immediate family of a member of staff while in their own homes.

Obviously there remains the question as to what can be done to prevent these robberies from occurring. I mentioned above that sure the levels of technology and security at the disposal of banks could ensure that they don’t happen. However, this article in the SBP points out:

The nature of the crime could be described as ‘asymmetric criminality’, because it employs simple psychological coercion to combat hi-tech security.

The only way to combat the crime is through avoidance of routine and developing what is termed ‘situational awareness’.

So it actually could come down to very simple procedures that could be most effective at preventing tiger kidnapping and robberies.

1. Avoidance of routine – don’t always have the same person responsible for the money every day.  Have more than one person responsible – 2 different people randomly responsible each day. In a bank branch of 25 employees, that would mean more potential combinations of employees with access on any one morning for any of these gangs to be able to cover.
2. I presume bank staff are provided with some sort of home and/or car security in the event of being approached. Even personal alarms of some sort would be enough to alert the necessary authorities of a problem.
3. There are already procedures in place for what should be done in the event of a tiger kidnapping and attempted robbery. It would probably be a good idea if these procedures were followed.
4. How about a system that prevents access to a bank to any staff outside of working hours? Any access outside of hours must be arranged in conjunction with security personnel, bank management and the Gardai?

Obviously, the stress and fear that a bank employee is under in such situations is incomprehensible for me. This BBC story, Can ‘tiger kidnappings’ be prevented?, has a quote from John O’Connor, former head of the Flying Squad in the UK:

“One way (to prevent these occurrences) is to have a system whereby more than one person needs to be present for a door or a vault to open, but even then if someone’s family has been kidnapped, they will do everything they can to persuade their colleague to come in and help them.”

I referred to an “inside man” above – and obviously, the presence of such an inclined person within the staff of a bank may be hard, if not impossible, to prevent. However, having strict and always followed procedures within a bank would also mean that even if such a person was inclined, they’d know that in their particular branch, it would be pointless to even attempt such a robbery because procedures are followed so stricktly.

The infamous Securitas robbery in the UK in which £52 million was stolen depended on an “inside man” to get the key information necessary to allow the gang responsible to right man to target for the tiger kidnapping.

This “inside man” was familiar with the procedures within Securitas at the time:

“We were given a card with an 0800 telephone number on it, and were told that if we were kidnapped we should ring that number, which I thought was a bit strange.”

Strange? How about completely useless, pointless, inappropriate and unfeasible?

I really don’t know. Simple straightforward procedures, rigidly followed, combined with up to the minute technology and security techniques have to be the solution to preventing these robberies completely.

Then again, maybe I’m being too simplistic here. What do you think?

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• June 1, 2009 -- Our country is being run by clowns
• August 7, 2009 -- NAMA. Some worthwhile reading.
• July 11, 2009 -- Consumer News Weekend Short Stack

One item that was mentioned that deserves to be highlighted as a Top Tip came from someone calling themselves Lil:

What I do do, is, when printing the boarding pass after online check-in, is to print a copy to PDF (i.e. create a PDF file using the print function) and this way, I can email myself a copy in case I need to print a copy closer to time if I’ve left the printed copy elsewhere, and not have to worry that I can’t access Ryanair’s website to reprint my boarding pass.

This is something that I do myself with all online confirmation pages – as well as just being a record for your own purposes, it could also be useful if any questions were to arise with your bookings in the future – it contains the web page details and so on necessary to indicate that a booking was made and confirmed to you.

You can download the free PDF writing application called PrimoPDF if you don’t already have the necessary software on your computer.

Update 22:45 – Thanks to the ValueIreland.com who sent in this related tip specifically for when travelling.

Liked the tip about e-mailing a copy of a boarding pass. In a similar vein, it is useful to e-mail your passport number to yourself so you can access it from abroad if necessary.

I’d add, just in case, make sure it’s not an e-mail that’s downloaded onto your phone in case your phone is stolen. If it’s on GMail or somewhere, then that might be safer. However, remember that that’s not 100% safe given recent issues with GMail as well.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• October 1, 2009 -- Ridiculous consumer views about Ryanair
• September 21, 2009 -- Ireland deserves foreign holidays!
• May 28, 2009 -- SayNoTo1890.com in Irish Times Pricewatch

It’s a couple of years since I reserved the Irish domain name www.TopTips.ie, and it’s due for renewal in June 2010.

I had a plan for TopTips.ie when I originally registered the domain, but work with ValueIreland.com overtook anything I wanted to do with it and I haven’t really bothered doing anything else with it.

So, if you like the domain name and if you’re interested in developing something for it, let me know and we’ll follow up and make the necessary arrangements to transfer the domain.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• November 3, 2009 -- Top Tip when booking online for anything
• October 12, 2009 -- NameAndShame.ie – Domain available for a good home
• June 26, 2009 -- Testing out a website that you’re not sure of – some top tips

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Check out the full series of recent Consumer News Short Stack links
available here.

More Related ValueIreland.com Posts:

• September 12, 2009 -- Consumer News Weekend Short Stack
• August 29, 2009 -- Consumer News Weekend Short Stack
• August 22, 2009 -- Consumer News Weekend Short Stack