Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We support this motion. There are aspects of it worthy of further interrogation, particularly the publication by Grant Thornton of its report predicting that 450 to 500 post offices will cease to exist by 2017. I question that figure because the evidence during the past five years would not bear it out. It would take a major diminution in services for that figure to be borne out in real terms. Notwithstanding that, there is a problem. Are people in rural areas going into their local post offices to use their services or do they drive past them and go to the nearest town, urban conurbation or city?

When I was a county councillor, I advocated strongly for young couples who wanted to build houses in rural areas. Between 2004 and 2007, I spent a great deal of time helping young people to obtain planning permission in rural areas where there are post offices. It is arguable, however, that most of those people do not use their local post offices but drive to the nearest town to avail of all the services available there. How do we disrupt that behaviour and incentivise people to develop a loyalty to their own local offices? That will be challenging. It will require behavioural change.

An Post made a submission recently to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Arts, Heritage, Regional, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs setting out metrics. It has introduced the court fines payment system. It will extend the National Lottery service to all post offices nationwide. The State savings business is growing and is worth over €20 billion. It is talking about plans to enhance those services but will that translate into more people going into post offices to transact that business or will people prefer to do it online? Since March 2014, An Post has experienced a decline of over 11% in core mail usage. Since the peak of mail reached in 2007, it has experienced a 38% decline. There is behavioural change from posting letters to online transactions, particularly for Government services.

I do not see the State directly subsidising individual post offices but a co-operative model for communities where the local post office is under threat has been mentioned. We had and still have a strong co-operative ethos in this State and I do not see why, with soft or hard supports, communities where there are offices at risk of closure, not being passed on to the next generation or with no uptake if somebody decides to retire, could not develop a social enterprise model . I do not know how many motions about rural post offices I have witnessed in the past ten years. If we can be progressive and expansive in our thinking and work with communities, we can see whether, short of direct subsidisation, we can build out a co-operative model. It is only one suggestion but it could be done on a trial basis in one or two communities.

If they feel strongly enough about their local post offices, and the surveys tell us that they do, then let us put that to the test and see if there are others ways of dealing with this issue. It it worth reading into the record again that which was stated by An Post. In March 2014, An Post said that it had more than 750,000 weekly Department of Social Protection customers. I know this has been mentioned already. This has now fallen to 625,000 customers, a decline of 17%. An Post has said that it was caused primarily by a decline of 30% in the number of jobseeker payments as people gained employment or moved onto schemes. An Post then experienced a reduction of 5% in pension payments due to the very low number of new pensioners choosing the post office option for their payments. I know that there were some tensions around that but we have to be honest: if people decide that they want their payments paid in a particular way, that is the choice of citizens.

While we in the Labour Party support the motion, I do not take the dystopian view that post offices will be wiped out. We have seen a growth in the number of one-off rural houses and we have seen investment in schools in rural areas. What we need to do now is see how we can help communities, particularly those in sensitive areas, such as the ones that Deputy Pearse Doherty spoke about in his own native Gweedore. If we take that as an example, and there have been public meetings around this, perhaps it is one area that we could look at as a model in which stakeholders can come together to sustain the post office and roll in other services, not just post office-related services but other social services, to create the kind of hub that is so vital to the rural communities to which we refer in the context of the motion.

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