Bobby Aylward (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is just getting angry and it is obvious he is getting angry because I am getting under his skin. He knows I am talking fact. To talk about what Fianna Fáil did years ago is not the Minister's job; his job is to rule as Minister now and to make decisions now.

Why would old postmasters and postmistresses who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s not take the package? Of course, they would - I would too. However, that is no reason for the post office to be closed. There was a meeting in Mullinavat, like the meeting in the Minister's area, with 400 or 500 people in attendance. There was a laughable appeals system which made a decision about the local post offices being so many kilometres away and about the size of the population, but it did not stop them being closed down. What about the people who wanted a post office? It is more than a business where people get stamps and pension payments; it is also a social outlet, but that is not taken into consideration. People want to keep rural areas alive but closing post offices is not going to keep them alive. The Minister is making people travel to neighbouring villages when they do not have the transport to do it. The appeals system is a laugh. It is closing post offices in an underhand way, and that is all it is.

Where people want to keep their post office open and where there is a local supermarket or other business willing to take it on, that should be allowed, once it is viable. I heard the Minister say in the House three or four times that he would come forward with proposals to make them sustainable but I never heard one thing back about that until we got the word that all these post offices would be closed. Let him stand up now and say why he did not make them sustainable and why he did not come back with the money to keep these post offices sustainable, instead of going on with this craic.

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