Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

With respect, I have tried not to be drawn by Deputy Pearse Doherty and I will take no history lesson from Sinn Féin Deputies. I will avoid the temptation to remind them how they treated postmasters and postmistresses in the past. I will pass on that but I will not take the lecture.

The reality is that on many occasions when post offices closed, there was no alternative and nobody took the business up. There was no attempt made by a Government at that stage to do a wholesale closure. If services can be identified that will generate more income for the businesses where a post office could be co-located, there is an opportunity, but I would not hang my hat on that solution or say it would bring the remaining post offices up to the viability threshold. What we have to get over as a State is being prepared to provide a level of subvention to support the delivery of postal services in those communities. It does not have to be a stand-alone post office.

I have sat in meetings the same as everyone else over the last months and heard it said that we could put the post office into a local shop. We do not need a postmaster or postmistress; we do not need concrete ceilings and roofs. The lads in Sinn Féin will appreciate that some of those threats we were talking about do not exist any more because of decommissioning and so on.

There is an opportunity to deliver the social welfare payments through the PostPoint platform. That has the capacity to ensure that social welfare payments are retained within communities and it would probably cost significantly less than the older model. At the community meetings that I attended, the people on those nights were more than happy to put forward ideas like that and would be happy if that service could be accommodated. The Minister has given some hope by suggesting the PostPoint platform could be expanded. So long as it can be expanded to deliver social welfare payments, there is the capacity to meet the needs of the communities.

However, this should not be allowed to take from the other villages that are now expecting to get the windfall from the closures because that is robbing Peter to pay Paul, which does not work either. That would be making big of one community and destroying another, and we should not be about that, in truth. We need to see a policy coming forward from the Minister's Department. I am sure he will get support from my side of the House and, based on the motion Sinn Féin has put forward tonight, it seems largely to be of a similar mindset to support the idea of State subvention for the smaller post offices that would not be viable no matter what business model the Minister came up with.

The Minister knows the small communities. I will name the post offices that are for closure in County Clare. Cooraclare post office almost closed but the village managed to retain its post office through a deal with the local postmaster. Doonbeg, Cree, Kilfenora, Lissycasey and Fanore are places where we absolutely need to retain the post office service. They are synonymous with similar villages throughout rural Ireland. The post office network cannot be condensed any further. I am of the view that we should protect what we have. For sure, there might be a fall-off in business in future years but just because there is a fall-off in demand does not mean we should eliminate a service for the elderly and vulnerable that is so much needed.

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