Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I know the reply was prepared by somebody else but, quite frankly, it was shocking. It is a rigged process. The independent appeals process is totally rigged. An Post privately came up with the 500 people and 15 km criteria. I have proved to the Minister of State that Ballinfull was not remotely looked at. In fact, An Post's first response on Ocean FM, given by one of its senior representatives, was that it was a typo in the letter. An Post has come back a little from this and now states it considered everything. It did not. Ballinfull was thrown under the bus and there are 1,000 people there. An Post also will not clarify how it calculates population for a substantially rural area. Ballinfull is not a village. The post office served 21 townlands with more than 1,000 people. Gurteen is a substantial village, it is a small town really, but we are not listening to the people there either. This decision was taken by the IPU, a trade union, and An Post.

We know An Post has a commercial mandate. It has to be subvented. Every year, the 8,700 rural post offices in the UK receive a subvention of £130 million. The amount here would be only €10 million. We are talking about a very small amount of money. It is not about cost, it is about realising there is value to rural Ireland. We have a culture whereby people live in rural Ireland. The Varadkar vision for rural Ireland needs to be more than milking it for every photocall it is worth and then shutting it down. In practice, this is what is happening. We had the shameful launch of Ireland 2040 in Sligo. The Government must think the people are stupid. It sent people off to work for six weeks on putting together a detailed report, as Ballinfull and Gurteen post offices did. We have proved that Ballinfull post office was not even considered because the response was out on a Monday morning and, according to the date, the decision had been taken the previous Monday. Gurteen and other places throughout the country can reasonably assume they were going through a superficial process because the decision had been already made by somebody else.

The former Minister, Deputy Naughten, is gone but the rest of the Government is responsible now. What will they do about it? Two weeks ago, a motion was passed democratically in the House to preserve the 159 post offices and provide a subvention. What has happened to it? It probably got thrown into a room along with all of the other motions we pass in here because the Government tends to ignore the will of Parliament while stating an issue is a matter for An Post, the HSE or somebody else but not it.

The Minister of State mentioned earlier about previous Governments allowing post offices to close. He is right. They got their answer in 2011. They were nearly wiped out. Since then, we at least have been trying to learn from those lessons. What is clear from the response of the Minister of State today is the Government has not.

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