Mr. Ned O'Hara:

There is no problem at all. I thank the Senator for his questions. In respect of the contract negotiations we had in 2018, as I said, the IPU has represented postmasters for the past 100 years, since the beginning of the State. It is a democratic organisation. It is not a totalitarian organisation. People have free speech and people were given the opportunity to speak. When that contract was proposed it was accepted by more than 80% of the members. I am the first to accept it was not the ideal contract but it was the best contract available at the time and the members agreed with that.

With regard to community banking, how could anybody oppose the concept of a community bank? The president has iterated what I said. It is not a panacea for the post office network. There are many issues, particularly with regard to online banking and, in particular, the capital required. To do the mortgages alone, for one mortgage per month for each post office there is a capital requirement of €2.7 billion and one mortgage per month for each post office is 36% of the entire market. The Senator spoke about Bank of Ireland and AIB. I believe their combined market share for the mortgages is 53% or 54% so we are talking about creating something that is almost as big as either of those banks. I cannot see that happening in the next three, four or five years.

What we are looking for is a plan for the current business cycle of five to seven years and we are prepared to have that plan reviewed every one, two, three, four or five years if people are afraid that they are being asked to put money into a black hole.

I said that what we wanted was Government services. We have looked for Government services. Government services have been recommended. No one service is big enough to solve the scale of the problem. I used the CAO applications as an example. We currently do not do CAO applications. I believe there are about 80,000 applications this year. If 50% of those, which is 40,000, came to the post office network, we are talking about the equivalent of four transactions per annum. The scale of the problem, therefore, is huge.

There is a range of 15 or 20 services we can provide that can probably fit in that gap. The biggest contributor we currently have is the Department of Social Protection and it is vital that those services are maintained for as long as possible. As I said in my opening remarks, ensuring that when the pandemic unemployment payment reverts to jobseekers' payments they are mandated for collection through the post office network is something that might be of that scale. If it was agreed that an interim payment was going to be made for a year or two, it will give the Government time to introduce those services and then reduce the subvention required. It is not us who are saying that. Grant Thornton, a third party independent business adviser, has said that. We have taken professional advice.

I have said that it should not have fallen to postmasters to produce that report. One would have thought that a Government managing a national asset would have some projections in respect of what it expected from that asset over the next four or five years. That is all we are asking for.