Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Tóghfaidh mé dhá nóimeád.

I visited a number of rural towns in my constituency last week. The first one I was in was Kildalkey where secondary school children have to walk ten minutes along a windy road, wearing high-vis jackets, first thing in the morning because the Department of Education and Skills took their seats on the school bus from them.

I was also in Collinstown on the first day the post office was closed. I was told by the person in the only remaining shop in that village that their profits and turnover that day were radically down.

I was also in the village of Clonmellon. It has a lovely broad street with beautiful old houses but only one in three of them is currently occupied. One bus rolls into and out of that village every day but that cannot be guaranteed.

I then went to Rathmolyon where I had organised an An Post save our post offices meeting. It was really well attended. People told me it would cost them €35 to get a taxi from their village to the next shop to collect their pension. In one day they were going to spend nearly 20% of their income just getting their income. As I drove home in the dark from that meeting, I realised Fine Gael is ripping the fabric of rural Ireland apart. In 20 years' time we will have 50% of the population living in Dublin city. This is an outlier in European terms. I do not know of any other European country where its capital city is so dominant. We will have a city state in this country. That not good for the people of Dublin because Dublin is overheating. People cannot get houses, they cannot get their children into schools and the streets are congested. The Government is even talking about taking water from the Parteen Basin on the River Shannon so that the people in Dublin can have water.

What we need in this country is proper spatial delivery, which we do not have. We are currently rudderless. It is incredible. A critical mass of footfall into these towns and villages is necessary so that other shops and businesses can function. If the post office is taken out of them, there is no way they can function. This is only the tip of the iceberg. The truth of the matter is that I met An Post and it told me that 500 post offices in this country were not economically viable. An Post sought 230 closures and it only got 159. It is a nonsense that the Minister would say that the pension decision of an individual postmaster should determine whether a whole town or village has a post office. A postmaster can make such a life decision and I am not questioning that but the Minister cannot let that be the decision of whether people can have a functioning rural society in which to live.

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