The Office of Consumer Affairs has published a list of the traders it has prosecuted. Commenting on the office's annual report, its director, Ms Carmel Foley, said the legal requirement to display pub prices continued to be a problem for some publicans last year, and prosecutions had had to be taken as a result.
The report included a prosecution list which showed that 18 traders were convicted for breaches of the Retail Prices (Beverages in Licensed Premises) Display Order, 1999. A further five were convicted under the Retail Prices (Beverages in Licensed Premises) Order, 2000.
Two traders were convicted for breaching the Retail Prices (Diesel and Petrol) Display Order and another for a breach of the Consumer Information Act.
Ms Foley said the highest number of the 21,517 queries and complaints received by her office last year concerned clothing. Other popular inquiries concerned motor vehicles, holidays, furniture and home improvements.
Inspectors carried out 2,003 investigations last year, an increase on the 1,767 completed in 1999. Misleading advertising, product safety and price display were the most common reasons for investigations.
A number of cases concluded satisfactorily for the consumer following the intervention of the Office of Consumer Affairs were highlighted in the report. These included the case of a Norwegian tourist who had paid for a set of regulators for his uileann pipes from an Irish craftsman in 1997.
The goods were not sent to him, and he contacted the ODCA last year, whose intervention resolved the matter to the satisfaction of the Norwegian.
In her report, Ms Foley also highlighted the issues which most concerned her office, including the monitoring of drink prices following a Government price-freeze order in July and a number of grocery-price surveys carried out in the last quarter in co-operation with the Consumers' Association of Ireland.
She said the transparency of the advertising of air fares was considerably improved by the introduction in March of an order requiring total price display and clear specification of restrictions.
Ms Foley said she had also been concerned at aggressive lending advertising by financial institutions last year.
