Ms Carol Bolger:

I thank the committee for the invitation to attend today. I look forward to engaging with it. I have served as a board member of An Post since 2017. A few months ago, I was invited to become chairperson. I joined the board just on the cusp of the transformation programme and have seen significant changes in the past four years.

I would like to start by giving the committee some information about myself. I have 30 years’ broad banking experience gained in Bank of Ireland and Ulster Bank. I worked in corporate and business banking, retail banking and credit risk. I also held senior roles, including chief operating officer of business banking and director for strategy and planning in corporate banking. In recent years, my career has been focused on the area of governance. I am a chartered director and a board evaluator with the Institute of Directors in Ireland, where I also tutor on the chartered director programme. I am a non-executive director on the board of BCMGlobal ASI Ltd, I chair Utexam Solutions, which is a subsidiary of BNP Paribas and I also chair the audit committee of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. I was previously a member of the board of the Health and Safety Authority, HSA, and the Coombe Women and Infants University Hospital. I am a certified bank director. I hold qualifications in finance, strategy and innovation and I am an accredited coach. I am fellow of the Institute of Banking, IOB, and I was a council member there for many years. I also acted as vice president there for a time.

Turning to An Post, it is a company with a proud record of service to the people of Ireland and the communities we serve. I see An Post as rooted in that fine tradition, working hard in the present but firmly focused on the future. I would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Mr. Dermot Divilly, who chaired An Post from 2015 to 2020. I have served as the pro temporechairperson of An Post in the interim before my appointment last July.

In that capacity, I outlined in our 2020 annual report how An Post put the common good and the national requirements at the forefront of its response to the pandemic. We put in place an enhanced service to vulnerable sections of our community, and we provided easier access to social welfare payments. We were asked by Government to help maintain the supply of cash to local communities and to keep the mail system open. We delivered on all of these requests. An Post doubled its efforts to facilitate home delivery. We removed much of the pain for the economy. A price increase that had been announced before the pandemic was postponed in our desire to support SMEs. An Post bore the burden of this in its own financial results.

The board and myself are proud of the achievements of the organisation. We have reiterated our commitment to play a positive role nationally in dealing with what continues to be unprecedented times for our country. Our challenge now is maintaining that high level of service to a rapidly changing Ireland and building a future based on the needs of our customers, grounded in the firm principles of sustainability. The challenges we face impact locally but are generated globally and are similar to those being faced by post companies worldwide.

An Post initiated a new strategy in 2017, which saw the business move forward significantly. We recorded a profit before depreciation of €79 million in 2019. This has contracted since the pandemic, and a profit before depreciation of €32 million was recorded in 2020. All post offices have continued to provide services and our delivery network has emerged as an essential service. We handled an increase in e-commerce traffic during 2020 of more than 100%. Brexit and customs changes have proven to be a disruptor but An Post has emerged as a significant solution. We continue to put in systems and processes to enable e-commerce to flourish. The group has a defined strategy and is looking forward to emerging from the pandemic period and returning to growth in 2022. We will continue to work with the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, and the officials in their Departments. Our strategy for the years ahead will see An Post play a leading role in the national recovery. That strategy, which I will oversee, will involve an investment of €200 million to €300 million in our networks over the next five years for physical and digital infrastructure.

We will continue our push ahead and develop a leading logistics network to meet the growth in e-commerce while building a sustainable mail delivery service. We will do this in line with our ethos of providing decent work for our people in contrast to the so-called gig economy.

We will invest in a transformed and sustainable post office network for customers, communities and SMEs.