Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

When it comes to postal services, we should apply the wise adage that if it is not broken, do not fix it. Probably nowhere does that wisdom apply more than to the postal service. It is not an exaggeration to say that the postal service is a modern wonder. Everybody gets the same service for next to nothing - it costs 55 cent to post a letter from anywhere to any other place in the country and people receive it within a day or two regardless of how isolated is the place they live.

As many speakers have said, it is not just an efficient and cheap service but it is also a social service. It is a lifeline for people in isolated areas, the elderly, those in rural communities and so on. It also provides good, decent, stable and secure jobs. While we might say that nothing is perfect in this world, the postal service is one of the better things in our society. Given that it works well, is reliable and is loved by people, why should we change it? Why does Europe want to change it and why would we accept its diktats in demanding that it be changed?

It is euphemistically called liberalising the service, but bringing for-profit considerations to bear on this social service would be a better way to describe it. Letting those with greed for money get their teeth into a social service which is so important to the people would be a better term than liberalisation. Is it not absolutely inevitable that if we bring market forces to bear on this service, cherry-picking will take place? Private for-profit companies will be interested in the profitable postal routes where there is high volume of letters and parcels, and will not be interested in those areas with low volumes, namely those isolated rural areas that need the service so much. Once they take the profitable routes from An Post, it will be left with the unprofitable routes and the ability of An Post to provide the service to those unprofitable routes is dependent on it also having those profitable areas. That cross-subsidy is the underpinning of the wonder of the postal service. If that is undermined, as liberalising will do, it will inevitably undermine the basis of what makes our postal service great.

All the good things that Deputy after Deputy has described about the postal service will inevitably be threatened by liberalisation. It will threaten the universal service, the daily service in rural areas and the social service value because for-profit companies are not interested in social services. It will threaten the low cost, which is spread evenly across the entire service, and will threaten jobs as it has done everywhere else liberalisation has been introduced with thousands of jobs lost in the service. In addition it will cause a problem of needless replication of services with several postal providers unnecessarily replicating themselves in particular areas while we will have virtually no service in other areas.

Is this not an example of the addiction of Europe to neoliberal economic dogma through privatisation? This addiction does nothing more than promote the interests of big private corporations which in the absence of being able to make profits anywhere else in the current difficult economic climate see vital public services as an area to prise open and sink their teeth into in order to make profit for themselves without any consideration of the vital nature of those services to the people who avail of them and the workers who work in them.

Did we learn nothing from the disaster of deregulating financial services? The deregulation of the financial and banking sector has led to disaster and underpinned the economic crisis. The deregulation allowing market forces to rip in the housing sector here caused absolute disaster for which we are now paying in spades. The deregulation and privatisation of water services in countries across the world, including Britain, have been disastrous and have been resisted hotly in many places and successfully, I am glad to say, in places such as Latin America. We need to stand up to this insane addiction of Europe representing the interests of corporate vultures by saying we will not allow the ripping up of this vital service, which works, is loved and has no reason to be changed.

I welcome the comments by the previous two Labour Party speakers, Deputies Tuffy and Nolan. It is great that they are saying those things and I could not agree more with them. I hope that when it comes to making a decision on whether we will accept or reject this legislation that threatens to destroy our postal service, they will not cave in, will stand up for the postal service and not capitulate to the insane addiction of Europe and the political establishments across Europe to the failed ideology of privatisation when it comes to the damage it could do to our postal service which is so loved and needed by the people.

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