Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The submissions have been very interesting and there is a common theme. All the organisations, the banks, credit unions and An Post, have one branch network. They are telling us also that there is a huge transfer to digital operations and, therefore, that manual transactions are decreasing by the day. Interpersonal relationships with small businesses are decreasing. That is the daily experience of those of us who live in rural Ireland. We are quite adept at using the Internet. In four or five years' time, please God, we will all have a gigabit of broadband in our houses, we all hope to have fibre and very powerful 4G and 5G and whatever. The transfer is taking place across all age groups. The idea that only the young use these mobile phones is not true. Every age group is using them, booking holidays online and so on.

Do the witnesses think it is sustainable to keep the branch networks they own? In the event that it is not, and that they will get more and more digital transfers, have any of them considered moving back-office functions away from the major cities, where there is congestion, where it may take people two hours to get to work – it takes an hour and a half to travel four miles in this city, as I know only too well – to rural communities where they can get highly qualified and motivated staff? The companies that do have rural locations for back-office work find that they are very successful. Will there be compensation because that is the growing business? When we ring a telecommunications or computer company we might wind up talking to anybody anywhere in the world. Why not rural Ireland, or towns in rural Ireland? I do not believe in denying the truth that the days when people had to go to a bank to do simple transactions are over. I have to confess that in the past 30 years I have stood in the branch of the bank that I deal with on two occasions. I do everything else some other way, such as by post or e-mail. Increasingly, this is becoming the way that people are doing business.

An Post has the added reality that every business in the country is trying to get people to go to variable debits and electronic receipt of the invoices. I do not think that is going to change. That is going to continue inexorably - how quickly we do not know. How fast can we get alternative services and how sustainable are those alternative services? In other words, are they just a short-term palliative and will that be taken over by the digital revolution? Looked at in a hard-headed way, the witnesses seem to indicate that income will decrease even if they bring in new services.

Postmasters and postmistresses - post office owners - make the case cogently that their incomes are not substantial. They cannot sustain reduced incomes. If we want to sustain a fairly broad network, can we retain all the branches? Is the move so great that even with extra business they are only sustaining their incomes and might even be sustaining decreasing incomes? We need to be hard-headed because, as somebody involved for years in rural development, I know that wishing the past came back never worked. Creating a future where we say here are the challenges and here are new opportunities for doing things in different ways because this is where people are going, has some chance of success. There is nobody more ruthless than the customer. If the customers want to bypass the local shop and go to the big town, or to do something electronically because that is easier, they will do it. They are booking hotels and holidays, doing banking transactions and so on online. Wishing that the local community, which we are trying to sustain, is going to act differently leads to a much greater chance of failure than facing up to reality and then dealing with it. I would be particularly interested in what all the witnesses’ organisations could do to provide other employment in rural Ireland, such as back-office work. If they were to consider the latter, what would be the inhibitors involved. Would it be availability of suitable people to employ, broadband capacity, the road network or whatever? We need to know what they are and to address those issues and provide for what the witnesses think is lacking. We live in a challenging world. One witness referred to Brexit. They can add Trump this morning.