Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome and support the aims of this motion to save and fully appreciate the rural post office and the vital role it plays in rural life. In recent months, I have raised this and associated issues in the House and have always received the same response from the Minister. I quote the Minister, Deputy Naughten:

It is Government policy that An Post remains a strong, viable company in a position to provide a high quality postal service and maintain a national network of customer focused post offices in the community.

I support him on that one. The Government supports this policy, so I guess it is supported by Fianna Fáil. Yet the irony is, despite the commitment given in the programme for Government, that this issue still remains, the threats remain and the uncertainty remains and grows stronger even as we hear Ministers trot out the same rhetoric time after time. A couple of weeks ago, the Minister reiterated the Government's commitment to rural post offices. Since then, on 3 November a local newspaper in Cork, The Corkman, quoted a fourth-generation postmaster, Mr. Henry Keogh, who says that he will be the last such postmaster in Rockchapel because the post office is no longer viable. If closed, as he points out, it will follow the post offices in Cullen, Rathcoole, Meelin, Milford, etc. The same paper recorded the closure of Kiskeam post office and the threats facing Duhallow.

This is repeated throughout the country. I am sure it is reassuring to postmasters who have worked for little more than the minimum wage to keep these office open. I am sure that it helps them as they see the offices close as I am sure it helps the elderly and isolated in rural communities to hear that it is actually official Government policy to keep them open, though they are closing day in and day out. If it is official Government policy, why did we hear Mr. Jim Daly, the director of retail operations in An Post, warn that many of the country’s remaining 1,100 post offices are unsustainable and, in effect, on the verge of collapse. I argue that it is not simply because people are posting less letters, because we are in a new digital age, because it is a sign of the times or because it is inevitable; it is because the sector of rural post offices has not been invested in or protected and its vital and social role is not appreciated or valued.

The problem has been compounded by decisions such as that taken by the Department of Social Protection to remove of cheque payment schemes from the post office network, the insistence by Government Departments that payments to them be made by bank draft rather than by means of methods offered by post offices and by the lethargy and slowness in producing an actual plan that would see real investment in rural post offices. There is a constant threat that the tendering of Government business such that relating to welfare payments could be lost at some stage by An Post, not to mention the issue that is often the trigger for actual closures, which is the reorganisation in the network and the sorting and delivery services being centralised outside of the offices themselves. There is no real effort or vision in the context of setting up an alternative banking system similar to the Kiwibank model in New Zealand or Sparkasse in Germany, which are examples of what is possible.

We still await any real steps to introduce proposals such as the use of post offices as local community hubs, with an extended range of services for the people living in those communities. The wider issue here, however, is embedded in the Government's economy policy, which is a neo-liberal model. It is a model that says that there is no alternative to it and that sees everything as being bought, sold or delivering a profit.

In supporting this motion, I believe we should remember how quickly this State sprang into action to bail out banks and bondholders and compare it to the foot-dragging of the current Minister and the Government on this vital issue.

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