We saw what happened to Eircom. I have repeatedly argued in this House and elsewhere that the ESB should not be a monopoly but I am certainly not in favour of opening up our services as we did with Eircom in 1999. A good friend of mine who is employed by that company was previously based in Clonmel but is now required to cover the entire south east. He would need a helicopter to travel around and he is on call every second weekend. Eircom's employees work very diligently but local knowledge has been lost. The company has changed hands so many times that its employees would be hard-pressed to know who owns it. This cannot be allowed to happen to An Post.

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