Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I disagree with the Deputy. I do not think it is a case of deciding how many post offices are needed. There is an opportunity to bring far more business into post offices in order to make them financially viable. An Post is going to come up with a plan that can actually put more business, work and footfall into post offices. There is a real opportunity here because there is a cohort of people who are not using or exploiting the post offices at the moment, including all of us in the Chamber at the moment. The only time that any of us goes into a post office - if we are honest - is to buy stamps at Christmas, to renew our passport in the summer or to get foreign currency if we are going abroad on holidays. What we need to do is to change the model whereby post offices are not solely reliant on social welfare business. That said, we need to maintain the social welfare payments through the post office network. We also need to maintain the current funding through the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, but there are opportunities to bring in new business, particularly in terms of banking and parcel services involving the use of the internet. By the end of next year, 97% of post offices in this country will have access to high-speed broadband, yet one in seven people in this country has never used the Internet. There are huge opportunities to provide services that are currently available online to communities that cannot access them at the moment.

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