Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is very fair to say the An Post brand is a very trusted one which I cannot overstate, similar to the way the Minister of State cannot overstate the value she places on her Department officials. The An Post brand is far more trusted than many of the pillar or other bank identities are. There is an element of doubt about the banks but everybody trusts the An Post network even if it is piggybacking on the AIB and Bank of Ireland networks to provide the front end of those banks which are pulling out of towns.

There is an age problem with the customer base in that it is generally older people. I have asked people, both younger and older, how often they use and are in post offices and what they were there for. I know people in their 60s and 70s who would be there two or three times a week and would use it for many things. I know people who used to go to my local shop which had a post office. They would go in, get their money at one counter and then bring it to and hand it over at the other counter.

People, however, under the age of 50, 40, or 30 are not using them in anything like the way that people of an older cohort are. My worry about that in the longer term is that we need to provide additional services. We are talking about these “additional services” in a vague sense but has the Minister of State any particular services which her Department is targeting?

We set up, for example, a national driver licensing system. Could we have done that through the post offices? This might not have involved every post office but perhaps 100, 200 or 300 of the larger post offices could have said that they could handle taking photographs, processing the paperwork and spreading that revenue instead of having 25 driving licensing centres, or whatever the number is. The alternative was that we could have had that service process through the post offices.

Perhaps there are other systems, such as social welfare payments and identity issues to ensure there are is not fraudulent activity and so forth, even if these payments are being made directly to back accounts, where recipients may have to come in, present themselves, and show that they are available for work, etc. What exactly is the Minister of State talking about in respect of these services?