Irish Examiner View: ComReg may require extra powers

Eircom news is vindication for so many customers

Eircom’s atrocious approach to its customers is now a matter of public record.

For readers who have lost hours in frustrating phone calls to customer service lines, news from the courts this week surely came as a vindication.

Dublin District Court Judge Anthony Halpin convicted and fined Eircom €7,500 after it was prosecuted by the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) over its former customer complaints procedures, with its behaviour described as disgraceful.

That is no exaggeration. ComReg compliance analyst Michelle O’Donnell told the hearing that Eircom customer care staff were warned not to give out the right customer complaint numbers or website address unless callers used specific “trigger words”, a level of obstruction that would be difficult to believe if it were not confirmed by the organisation’s own training manual.

Eircom supplies broadband, TV, and mobile services, as does Virgin Media. 

The latter company’s customers in Cork spent a sizeable chunk last weekend without broadband service, which failed for almost 24 hours. 

As reported here, customers were angry with the lack of detail from Virgin Media about the restoration of service: The company estimated a restoration several times but missed almost all of those self-imposed deadlines.

In an era when broadband supply is less a luxury than an absolute infrastructural requirement, there was no shortage of complaints from customers who were unable to work from home while the service was down. 

Those complaints were fuelled by a frustration with the lack of information forthcoming from the company about the outage.

Reliable, high-quality broadband is a necessity in any modern economy — as is efficient, courteous customer service. 

Eircom’s atrocious approach to its customers is now a matter of public record, as is Virgin Media’s substandard response to legitimate inquiries over the weekend.

It was good to see ComReg, which has regulatory authority in the general area of telecoms, to the fore in this regard in recent days. 

That organisation may need further powers, going by recent glimpses of the modus operandi of these companies.

Belfast or Berlin? Starting point for awareness

Comments from the Taoiseach at a recent meeting of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly have attracted attention, unsurprisingly.

“Probably people of my generation are familiar now with London and Berlin and Paris than they might be with Belfast or Derry,” said Simon Harris.

Some readers may be old enough to remember one of his predecessors in government making a similar statement in 2000. 

Mary Harney, the then enterprise minister suggested that while Ireland was geographically closer to Berlin than Boston, we were spiritually closer to Boston.

(The intended audience for both comments should be noted — Ms Harney was addressing the American Bar Association, while Mr Harris was speaking to an organisation with deep roots in London.) 

Are the Taoiseach’s comments accurate when it comes to those of his generation?

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It is always dangerous to seek to speak for such a large cohort of people, and there are no doubt plenty of Mr Harris’s contemporaries who would contest his generalisation about their familiarity with cities in the North.

There are also likely to be plenty of people — contemporaries of Mr Harris or not — happy to point out that our road networks and transport systems are not conducive to smooth interaction between the opposite ends of the island.

Travelling from Cork or Kerry to Derry or Antrim, for instance, can be a real challenge and a physical disincentive to familiarity.

However, it might also be instructive to look past the immediate meaning of the Taoiseach’s words and to consider a deeper one. 

There is another context in which ‘familiarity’ may denote more than knowing street names or shortcuts in another town or city: Becoming more aware of and knowledgeable about the background, beliefs, and biases of other communities would be a welcome development for everyone on the island, north and south.

In that sense it might be wiser to use Mr Harris’s comments as a starting point for increasing that awareness rather than contesting their literal meaning.

Conan O’Brien: Coming Home

For many years, the American late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien has stressed his Irishness, and on a recent visit to this country he doubled down on his ethnicity.

O’Brien is to make his Irish TV drama debut with a cameo in an episode of TG4’s long-running Irish language soap opera, Ros na Rún, which is due to air on April 30.

O’Brien will play a feisty delivery man who goes head to head with Ros na Rún’s local rogue and publican, Tadhg Ó Direáin: Viewers can expect a verbal clash between the two conducted in the State’s first official language (“I apologise in advance for inadvertently butchering my mother tongue,” O’Brien said in a statement).

Conan O’Brien will make his Irish TV drama debut with TG4’s long-running drama series 'Ros na Rún.'

His cameo on the TG4 soap is expected to feature in a documentary O’Brien has made about his visit to Ireland, which is due to air on HBO Max.

He is not the first celebrity to pop up in Ros na Rún — actor Stephen Fry and country music legend Daniel O’Donnell have also appeared — but O’Brien was also a renowned comedy writer in his time, authoring the legendary monorail episode of The Simpsons. 

He might perhaps have punched up a script or two for Ros na Rún if he had had time.

Then again, given his most famous script shows a town hoodwinked by a con man’s plan for infrastructural improvement, it might have been too close to the bone for some local authorities in Ireland.