Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Fáiltím an deis labhartha ar an ábhar tábhachtach seo. At the outset, I will declare an interest. My brother owns the local post office in the village I come from, Drinagh, in west Cork. I spent many happy summers delivering the post for An Post and I have many fond memories of that.

This debate always amuses me at some points and infuriates me at others because we miss a lot of the real detail when we start talking and when politics gets introduced. Populist politics does not really contribute much to the debate on post offices.

I come from a constituency where recently I had the great honour of attending the re-opening of a post office in west Cork. Leap post office, which had closed a couple of years ago because an issue arose with the people running it, thankfully re-opened two or three weeks ago. We had a great afternoon celebrating it. My colleague opposite, Deputy Michael Collins, was there as well. It is not all doom and gloom in the post office sector, but there are threats there and issues we must keep a watchful eye out for.

However, it is not Government intervention that is required in the post office system, but old-fashioned management. Somebody must take it by the scruff of the neck, drag it up and ask what it will do to make itself relevant and join the real world. Government intervention will be all about bureaucracy, rules and regulations, so that is not the solution. The decline of post offices is a symptom, not the disease. People attacking the symptom are missing the point. The issues affecting rural Ireland are much bigger and greater. It is far too narrow a focus to discuss them in the context of post offices.

I will conclude on a final issue. It really annoys me to hear Members of the House demand that the Department of Social Protection insist on payments being made through post offices. I resent and reject that call by the Members on the benches opposite. It is abhorrent that we should force people who are sick, elderly, vulnerable or who are carers not to have their money put into their banks like the rest of us. They must traipse down to the post office and collect their payment.

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