Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am under pressure to leave and I thank the witnesses and the Minister for coming here today. I have a question for the Minister. In the past few years I watched closely a game of pass the parcel, pardon the pun, in the relationship between what is going on here and what went on in the Dáil between the Minister, Deputy Naughten, the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Ring and the Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Humphreys. No one wanted to take responsibility for what we were watching unfold in front of us, namely, the collapse of the post office sector. I believe this is the beginning of something much bigger and not the end of it.

Will the Minister take responsibility for the outcome of the closure of the 159 post offices and any future closures? There have almost been scraps between himself and the Ministers for Rural and Community Development and Business, Enterprise and Innovation on the floor of the Dáil with each refusing to take responsibility for the issue and saying it was somebody else's responsibility. It now seems that the Minister and Mr. McRedmond are saying the responsibility for the closure of these 159 post offices is that of the postmasters and postmistresses themselves and that they have made that choice. I do not accept that for a minute. In the style of the Mafia, they were made an offer that they could not refuse because they were not being offered an alternative or viable contract. Will the Minister and Mr. McRedmond comment on how it came about that 159 people who had resisted the closure of their local post office, having looked after their communities informally but in a close and caring way, would suddenly decide that they would close? There must be something behind it.

If in 2019, An Post loses the tender for social welfare, will the remaining post offices have the volume of business required to remain viable? After two and a half years, regardless of the social welfare payments, how will the Minster and An Post decide whether the volume of business and the footfall is good enough? This process will be incremental, with more and more closures because the footfall will not be good enough. I use my local post office in Ballyfermot frequently. The main footfall relates to the collection of children's allowance, pensions and other social welfare payments and the payments of bills as people collect them. If An Post loses that tender, hundreds of post offices will close in the Ballyfermots of Dublin, Limerick, Cork and so on, where the main source of footfall is social welfare payments.

I have a question relating to something which was discussed during the previous session when the Minister and Mr. McRedmond were not present. Is either of them interested in a model such as Sparkasse or Kiwi, a public banking model that could make a return to the community? How do they feel about the report which the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform issued in July in which he said that the Government would not pay out €170 million to fund a public bank, when it had no problem paying out €69 billion to bail out Anglo Irish Bank, AIB and so on. I cannot stay for their replies but I will watch back and hope that they will reply.