Micheál Carrigy (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Chairman for the opportunity to come in. I myself am a postmaster. We have had the local office in my home town in Longford since 1972 and I have been postmaster since 2012. As I am also a member of the Irish Postmasters Union, I welcome Mr. Martin and Mr. O'Hara in particular, who I know very well. They are excellent representatives for our organisation. A comment was made by Senator Craughwell and I say, as a postmaster at the time, that we were no way duped by the union. Proposals were put in front of us that the union fought for with An Post etc., and everyone had a democratic decision to vote on it. I wanted to make that clear.

I will give members an idea of being a postmaster. I am slightly below the average mentioned earlier. When we lost four postpersons a number of years ago, I took a 12.5% reduction in wages. I took another 10% reduction in January and expect another 10%-plus in July, and further. I run one of the smaller offices and that gives an idea of the type of cuts we have taken and will take. Will I survive? It is highly questionable. I have a small shop with my business, which work together and which I moved into in 2007 to try to maintain both services. However, I have seven part-time and full-time workers and it will be difficult, given the trajectory on which it is going and the earnings coming in.

A number of Deputies have mentioned the word "community" and that is what it is all about. It is about maintaining community and maintaining our towns and villages. Going around every town and village in the country, there are empty properties everywhere. If we do not invest in bringing people back to our towns and villages and if we do not have services there, people will not come to live there. If we start losing our post office network, which in many towns will be the only financial services site left, other ancillary businesses will lose out and close because of the reduction in footfall that will occur.

Numerous members mentioned Bank of Ireland and AIB. Looking back to the financial crash in 2009 and 2010, the State and the taxpayer bailed out both banks with substantial amounts of money. Postbank was in its infancy, with 200,000 customers, and we were not subsidised or helped. We had to shut down. It was a bank that had no debt and customers with assets in their accounts and we were not bailed out or helped. We are looking for help now. One only has to look at the UK, where hundreds of closures happened through the beginning of the 2000s. They are now spending hundreds of millions incentivising people to reopen offices in towns and village because those towns and villages died. People were not going into them but were going into the main towns.

There is a huge opportunity here. If we want to revitalise our towns and villages, the first thing we need to do is to maintain the post office service and the footfall going into towns and villages in order that we can then invest in bringing people back into living there. We need to value the public service that the post office provides. We are not looking for more money. We just want to retain what we have, whether that is through a PSO or a retained earnings model, which was mentioned by Mr. Martin. There might be issues with state aid rules in respect of a PSO but we are not seeking more money. We want to maintain what we have and we are prepared to do more work for that. That is what we ask and there is a huge opportunity here for us to reinvest in our rural towns and villages.

Mr. O'Hara mentioned a figure of possibly 200 in the larger towns. It think it will affect more. I was at my union meeting recently and there could be considerably more people that would pull out because it will not be financially viable to stay in the business with the forthcoming reduction in pay.