Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the members of the Rural Alliance for using their Private Members' time to talk about the postal network, to highlight not only the importance of it but also the challenges the network is facing, particularly in the digital age.

A Programme for a Partnership Government acknowledges the importance of the post office network and commits to take action to protect the future of the network, including through the implementation of the post office business development group report, the roll-out by An Post of an e-payment account and the development of community banking along with a range of other services. We want to see the local post office re-established as a hub, giving people living locally access to a range of services.

As a Deputy representing a constituency that includes large urban areas but very large rural areas, small villages and large towns, I understand the importance of the local post office as a community focal point for a wide variety of different people, such as those living in isolated rural areas for whom the local post office is a vital link to services, those living in small villages for whom the post office is a major economic driver and those many older people living in larger towns for whom the post office is a community touchstone. For all these reasons, the post office and the wider network is worth protecting and defending.

It would be naive of us not to accept the reality of the digital age in which we live. If the local post office is vital to older people who grew up using its services, we must recognise that for many young people today, our digital natives, the local post office is seen as an outdated institution. This generation uses e-mail, text, WhatsApp and Facebook. They do not use postage stamps. They bank online, pay their bills online and live a large portion of their lives online without the need to queue in line in a post office for any service that is currently provided. This is as true for those young people living in rural Ireland as it is for their counterparts living in urban Ireland. Our post office network needs to offer the digital natives, who will in a few short years make up the majority of our population, access to the services they need.

We all are aware of the post office network business development group's report and I will not dwell on it. I refer to a second report that was prepared last year by Accenture, entitled Achieving High Performance in the Post and Parcel Industry. This international report assessed a number of postal services in countries across the world, all of which are facing challenges like ours, and highlighted where those companies were succeeding. The report identified a number of areas where traditional postal services could find success, including the need to take steps to defend their core business by investing in product innovation to offer a better service, investing in parcel opportunities, which is an area of real potential, and diversifying, especially into the area of logistics and taking advantage of the digital opportunities which are being created.

Every single post office in this country is an ideal opportunity to provide a Parcel Motel location. It will bring our younger people, who are doing all of their purchases online, directly into this community touchstone to allow them to access the other services they are not even recognising in their daily lives. In the development of our post offices, can we please look not only at Parcel Motel but also at that kind of initiative?

See this speech in context