Mr. David McRedmond:

We have been looking for those services for a number of years. I am not sure we have been looking for them with the degree of co-ordination or vigour required to get all those services. In some cases, they have been put out to tender and there are public procurement rules around some of the services. We have tendered for the services and we have not always won them. Sometimes, we have not won the tenders. We have certainly made great efforts to get some of the services but it has not been as organised as I would like. That is why we have set up An Post Retail, the post office, as a separate business. It used to be that the operators of that business ran the operations and the marketing and product went across the whole of An Post. The post office is the smaller part of An Post, with the bigger part being the mails and parcels business. The post office did not get enough of a look in. That is why we made the decision to put in place an integrated management team and a management board to be able to deliver that.

Members will see a much stronger approach to it. They have heard from the Minister about some of the work Debbie Byrne has been doing in lobbying the Department and the Minister to ask for a protocol to be put in place so we can get these services. That is what we are doing. We have no doubt that we are very vigorous in going for that. I agree with the Deputy about making that a very substantial business, and we are ambitious for it. With regard to extending the parcel service to a people service, we can always look at that. I am used to facing scepticism about these proposals. I would initially be sceptical because delivering parcels is a difficult and complex enough business itself. It looks very simple for a van to go down a road and deliver a parcel but we have a network which brings parcels in from around the world, which has cut-off times and so on. There is complexity and skill to doing it but we would certainly consider it.