Mr. Ned O'Hara:

That is a debatable point. Through the history of the State, the post office has been paid transaction fees. When we changed to commercial rates in 2018, the system that was replaced was a scaled payment system, which meant that post offices were paid different rates for different transactions. For instance, if a television licence was sold in one office, it was paid a different rate than another office would be. Under the new arrangement, everybody is paid the same amount. They are commercial rates. Before this, the busier offices were paid lower rates and it made those uneconomic. That was the crisis that we faced in 2016, 2017 and 2018. Due to a lack of action, we decided that we had to address the issue ourselves, otherwise the entire model would have collapsed three years ago.

Regarding transaction rates, we are paid commercial rates. There is a cap. There is a commercial market for some of our services and we have to have regard for that. There are other services where we feel that the customer could be asked to pay more and would be willing to pay more. I do not know how many lines we have. Mr. Martin might be able to say. There are approximately 170 different rates for different transactions. I think we have approximately 1,000 lines entirely.