Honest to God, An Post/customs have completely lost the plot

[BlackAmericanoNoSugar]

A friend of DH's in America sent a couple of baby outfits for our new granddaughter. The first we knew of it was a note from An Post asking for €72 in customs charges and VAT on a parcel valued at €183. We eventually worked out who it was from and contacted him and he said it was probably about $30 worth. He has no idea what would make them think it was €183 worth (I'm not sure if he filled out a customs declaration or not, but I assume that he sends stuff to his family in Ireland so should know the process). But even if it was hugely expensive designer stuff, it's still clearly BABY clothes which is zero VAT rated. They're just taking the piss TBH.

Not to mention the sheer inefficiency ( or whatever) that it takes a full 2 MONTHS for them to deliver a small parcel posted in UK. I queried it at my local p.o. Staff in post office said "yea, you left ( Brexit)and now we're going to punish you"!
No more packages will be posted, suffice to say!

And 2 of my local post offices have closed down
The queue outside my now nearest one was awful pre Christmas.
The government should never have taken the running of the National Lottery from An Post and given it to some forrin company to run and gain all the profits.
Such a stupid decision.
What idiot politicians signed off on that. 🙄
An Post has to find money somewhere.

I have always found an post great until recently when it became deathly slow. I'm currently waiting on something important that was sent on the 8th of December in the UK but still hasn't arrived, unfortunately it has no tracking. Meanwhile something that was sent from India on the 24th of December arrived last week I didn't have to pay customs on that either even though it was worth €80?

I eventually found an email address so I wrote to them. The wrote back saying "I would advise you to pay the current charge and then request a refund when the parcel arrives by showing the items contents." Like fuck they would give me a refund. Who would I show the contents to for a start? It would get delivered to my address when I might or might not be there.

Maybe the Addresspal service AnPost offers would be better. It covers U.K & U.S. I've used it a few times since Parcel motel suspended it's U.K service after Brexit. I also order more from European companies to avoid the customs charges.
The charges they are applying there are crazy for the value, if it's marked as "gift" it should be free from fees.

I've used Address Pal a fair bit and they're reasonable-ish. They open the parcel and do an internet look-up of the value so at least the figure is ballpark correct. I did have something that I ordered from the US that sat in the Address Pal depot in the States for nearly a month because they were having some sort of labour dispute but other than that it's been fairly smooth.

The trouble with this particular parcel is that it was sent by a friend as a gift so he had no access to my Address Pal account.

I try to order from Ireland if possible and the EU otherwise but there is some stuff that can only be found in the US (I quilt so sometimes I'm trying to track down a particular fabric line). Plus I have heard a couple of stories of people having to pay customs and VAT on items that they ordered from The Netherlands and Germany because it came through the UK. There doesn't seem to be any process at all for querying things, they can pay and get their parcel or not pay and have the parcel sent back.