Galway City and County councils have the highest level of complaints made to the Ombudsman which are upheld of any local authority in Ireland.
The Office of The Ombudsman’s annual report for 2018 details all the complaints it received over the year and how they panned out, including those about local councils.
In total 42 complaints were made to the Ombudsman’s Office about Galway City Council last year, of which 12 were upheld, and 2 were partially upheld.
That’s one third of all complaints made about the city council which were upheld, at least in part, significantly more than any other council.
The only council with the same number of upheld complaints was Cork City Council, with 13 fully upheld and 1 partially upheld.
But that’s out of a total of 72 complaints made about Cork City Council.
Galway County Council had the second highest proportion of complaints made to the Ombudsman upheld at 27% last year.
A total of 37 complaints were made to the Ombudsman’s Office about Galway County Council, of which 9 were fully upheld and 1 was partially upheld.
The lowest level of upheld complaints in 2018 was in Kilkenny, where of eight complaints made none were upheld in any way.
While Dublin City Council had the largest number of complaints made overall at 129, of which 16.1% were upheld or partially upheld.
The Office of the Ombudsman received a grand total of 3,300 complaints about public services last year.
The largest share of those, 1,065 complaints, were about services provided by government departments, while another 879 were about local authority services.
After that health and social care services (730) accounted for most of the remaining complaints.
The total number of complaints made by the public increased by 11% in 2018 according to the Ombudsman.
