Contact us

If you are not satisfied with our services you can complain to our Complaints Officer by emailing info@ihrec.ie and marking for the attention of the Complaints Officer,  by phoning us on 01-8589601, or writing to us. The Complaints Officer is the Head of Governance and Corporate Services. 

When we get a complaint, the Head of Governance and Corporate Services will:

• Send it to the most relevant Team that should deal with it
• Designate a trained complaints officer to deal quickly with the complaint
• Log the complaint and our response

Section 38 of the Disability Act says a person, or a specified person (see below), may make a complaint in writing to the head of a public body if that body is not following the law as outlined in sections 25, 26, 27, 28 or 29 of the Act.

A specified person can be:

• a husband or wife, parent or relative of a person with a disability
• a guardian or a person acting on behalf of a person with a disability
• a legal representative of a person with a disability
• a personal advocate assigned by the Citizens Information Board to represent that person

What happens next?

Your complaint will be passed on to an Inquiry Officer for investigation. The Disability Act says public bodies must put independent Inquiry Officers in place. Their job is to examine complaints. Each public body must also publish a document with guidelines about how complaints are looked after.

The Inquiry Officer must write a report with the results of the investigation and give a copy to the head of the public body you have complained about and also to you or the person who made the complaint on your behalf. This report must show what the Inquiry Officer has found and decided about your complaint. If the Inquiry Officer decides your complaint is valid, the report must say what the public body has to do now to fix the problem.

Investigations by Inquiry Officers must be carried out in private.

Information about how to complain must be included in each sectoral plan.

If you have complained and are not happy with the Inquiry Officer’s decision, you can ask the Ombudsman to look into your complaint. If your complaint is about a sectoral plan and you are not happy with the decision of the Complaints Officer, you can ask the Ombudsman to examine your complaint.

If the Ombudsman finds a problem with how your complaint was handled, he or she can recommend that the public body:

• takes another look at your complaint
• takes certain actions to make things better
• explains its actions to the Ombudsman

The Ombudsman can ask for a response to the recommendation(s) by a certain date.