Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

-----and working very hard. People from various rural communities throughout the country are angry about the situation. I know that the Minister is aware of this because he comes from a rural community. People are angry because they believe the Government has let them down. As my colleague just said, in many small towns and villages where post offices are due to close, other services have been withdrawn in recent years. We are not in this situation because of what happened in recent weeks or months but due to what happened in the past 20 years. The post office service has been run down. In fairness to the Minister, he was not in office while that was happening, but others have allowed it to happen.

The harp over the door in the post office is meant to symbolise the State providing services for the people. Thirty or 40 years ago the Department was known as the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. What happened to it? Communications was considered to be a vital service the Government provided for the people, but that is no longer the case. It is something to be chopped and changed, privatised, hived off, cut back and made smaller and more compact. Government is getting smaller. Two weeks ago at a committee meeting I said I felt it was part of a corrupt political system. I was not being personal towards the Minister or the Department but the entire system in this country. We have a political system that is about small government, government shrinking and stating to the public that it will not interfere too much in people's lives. Such a model was championed by Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. That is the model people are experiencing throughout the country and unless we change it, there is no hope for rural areas because the places that will be impacted on first by such a model of governance are those that are under the most pressure, namely, places such as my community in Aughavass where the post office has closed and where there is little prospect of getting a new contract in place, although the post office would be co-located with a bar and a shop. The same situation is evident in the town of Killeshandra and Ballinphull and Gorteen, County Sligo where the post office is closed and people are seeking to take it over. That is happening all over the country. These communities deserve to have post offices. Other individuals want the contracts and are prepared to apply for them to run the post office for the benefit of the community. It is not too much to ask that the Government which represents the people, who are the messengers of the people and who are elected into government do what they need and provide a vital communications service for the public. The post office is a public office with a harp over the door to where people can go to avail of a service in their community.

I wish to focus on the core of the issue for communities. When people were told that their post office was to close, they were told the community could seek a review of the decision. The review was to look at the criteria used to close each post office. Reference was made to the number of people in a community. It was said no community with fewer than 500 people would be left without a post office. When we get into the detail, it appears that the reference is to no settlement with fewer than 500 people would be left without a post office. I teased out the issue at the recent committee meeting which the Minister also attended. It was acknowledged that An Post was using the definition of a settlement in the 2016 census, namely, 500 people living in at least 50 occupied houses, none of which was more than 100 m apart. Anyone who knows anything about the country knows that the vast majority of rural communities live in dispersed rural settlements with scattered dwellings. That is the way we have evolved over centuries, possibly for thousands of years, yet we use the stupid model I have outlined to decide whether we will keep vital post office services in place. The first thing the Minister needs to do is go back to An Post and tell those involved in the review of postal services that in order to make decisions about putting post offices in place, they must change the criteria used. They need to accept that, for example, in my parish when people speak about the community or the settlement, they speak about the entire parish. In other areas they speak about a village and a reasonable distance around it from which people commute to avail of postal services. The definition of a settlement is totally anti-rural and destroys everything those who stand up for rural Ireland should support.

I spoke privately to the Minister about the issue and will not divulge the contents of a private conversation. The Minister said post offices such as my local post office in Aughavass should have a fair chance of survival because they had a pub, a shop and other services located there. Post offices in Killeshandra, Gorteen, Ballinphull and other places should have a fair chance of survival if they can be co-located, but that option seems to have been turned on its head by the managers in An Post. The challenge is for the Minister to stand up to An Post and make sure he stands up for rural areas and provides postal services for everyone who deserves them.

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