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As the country returns to business as usual, many have been left with the Christmas hangover of not receiving parcels or packages on time or at all because of either customs charges about which they were not warned, or the postal strikes in Britain.
Many people have taken to social media to show that their items were being held at delivery stations or being sent back to the retailers or businesses they were ordered from, having not received any notification or message to explain what was going on.
In one case a woman detailed how she had ordered a jacket for her son for Christmas on November 24 from a company in Wales, paying €28 in doing so.
It didn’t arrive to her home in the midlands until December 30.
While she noted that the company she had ordered from were apologetic in their emails once she had contacted them about the missing delivery, there was still disappointment as the gift had not arrived by Christmas despite being ordered nearly a month beforehand.
The issue usually reaches a head in the run up to Christmas, but as one man told the , it has been going on for some time before that.
Michele explained how he had ordered a CD from the website of the musicians The Chemical Brothers back in July.
He never received the item as it was held up during shipping from Holland to Ireland, with An Post saying there was an issue with Vat, which Michele claimed he had already paid.
He was alerted to the charge on the CD via email and in the post.
“I queried the charge with An Post, but they took about a month to reply to my query. By the time they’d replied, the item had been sent back,” he said.
The problem stems from Brexit, with EU Customs rules stating that compliant electronic customs data must be supplied for all incoming non-EU items by the sender.
Many British retailers are not aware of this and therefore do not have the correct systems in place for Irish customers.
This, in turn, causes delays or returns when the parcels arrive in Ireland.
A spokesperson for An Post said: “An Post collects the customs charges that are applied by Irish Revenue on items delivered to Ireland from non-EU countries ( according to EU Customs regulations).
“If customs charges are due on an item, the customer will receive a postcard in the post with details of the charges, or an email and/or an SMS if these details have been provided by the sender.”
Before Christmas, An Post had warned of possible delays due to the busier time of year coupled with postal worker strikes in the UK.
The company says that these strikes are still causing issues.
“The Royal Mail strikes have most certainly impacted deliveries of letters (including Christmas cards) and parcels to Ireland.
“We are seeing items arriving from Britain that were posted in early /mid December, and there is no sequence to them either.”
On top of that, An Post expect there to be a delivery “en masse” at the end of January of Christmas cards which did not have the correct stamp on them from the UK, with Royal Mail withholding said cards for underpayment.
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