Ms Debbie Byrne:

As regards our stated strategy, we see a bright future for the post office in the growth of mail and parcels. We have talked about banking services and e-commerce. The missing part of the strategy is the delivery of Government services. A new departmental working group or committee was recently set up, which is chaired by Barry Lowry, the chief information officer in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, and includes the new assistant secretary in the Department. That group brought in a number of experts over the last number of months. We have not had the opportunity to meet with the group ourselves but we wold love to do so and are working on that. It is due to deliberate in July. That is important. Everybody talks about new services in the post offices but there have not been any. An Post has delivered lot of new products and services but we need to be an arm of the Government, deliver more services and provide a better service to citizens. If I wanted to get a new driving licence, there are 60-odd offices across the country where I could do that. Would it not be better if people could go to one of 300 post offices? Granted, we are not going to put photo capture kit into 930 offices but there are many other services they could provide, like dealing with planning applications. With the hybrid working model we have now, there will be a lot of Government and local offices across the country where full services will not be available because their staff will be working from home for whatever the designated period of time is. There is an opportunity there for post offices to offer a wider range of services. The technical infrastructure is there and it is robust because of our interactions with social welfare and the major banks. This is a real opportunity to better serve communities. We welcome the Deputy's support on this matter.