Duncan Smith (Dublin Fingal, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their statements and contributions thus far. We have reached a point where we must have a long think about how we want our towns to develop. The main streets in our towns were home to many different types of shops 20 or 30 years ago, including hardware stores, drapery shops, butcher shops and so forth but they have all gradually disappeared. They have either moved to the outskirts of towns or to shopping centres in large regional towns. The local post office is almost the last one standing in terms of being an active community centre or hub on our main streets and in the centre of our towns. The protection of post offices should not be and is not a nostalgic notion. For as long as I have been interested in politics, post offices have always asked for responsibility for new services. They have wanted to evolve, have asked for new services and for help to develop further and to sustain their position as a focal point in towns and communities. They have always shown a desire to be flexible but for reasons that have always caused people to scratch their heads, we remain on this perpetual cliff edge which it seems we are actually going to reach at the end of June. We have heard very worrying testimony from the witnesses. We cannot continue to allow our post offices to wither on the vine. Ultimately, we will end up with main streets that house only fast food outlets and bookies' shops. That is essentially where we are going. I represent a constituency in north Dublin which is a collection of towns and villages, the same as many other Deputies on this committee and beyond. I have seen those communities wither and diminish in terms of what is offered in the centre of town, with only the post office still standing.

I have a specific question on the recent Bank of Ireland announcement, by which I am quite intrigued. Bank of Ireland has announced that it is going to close branches but its statement suggested that the post offices will take over that business, which is great because it will be a shot in the arm for the post offices. I ask the witnesses to outline how much, if any, negotiation was done with the post offices in advance of or since the release of that statement. I seek an explicit answer because the public was left with the perception that the post offices were in on this and were going to benefit from it but from what we have heard today, that could not be further from the truth. The witnesses stated that up to 200 post offices are in imminent danger of shutting after 1 July. While I am not seeking the details, do the witnesses have those listed in order of degree of risk? The witnesses alluded to the fact the busiest offices are more at risk. What level of work has gone into identifying the post offices that are at critical risk?