Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Interestingly, I recently visited Mountmellick and found it to be a thriving community with great enterprising initiative being undertaken. It is using the fund of €1 billion the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Ring, has made available. It has competed for the fund, developed projects and is a shop window of good examples of how towns are taking their revival seriously. It has also revived old buildings to bring them into new uses. From my point of view, however, I must ensure that An Post, which has been given legislative independence, is allowed to ensure that the postal service it delivers is in tune with the needs of the community it serves. There is no future for us if An Post cannot develop the types of services on which it has based its strategy. We need to see it being a more vibrant servant to the community. It needs to move away from providing a service in decline, namely, the standard post mail, and develop the new opportunities that exist. It has been remarkably successful in that regard. It has achieved an agreement with its unions that has allowed it to transform its business and grow new business in different areas. It must be able to respond to the direction of its business.

It is untrue the decision spells a decline of rural towns. If we do not have thriving postal services, or thriving broadband access in our regional communities, or regional enterprise strategies, or the rural development fund, which allows people to develop initiatives from the bottom up, rural Ireland will decline. They are the modern tools of ensuring thriving towns, villages and rural communities. We must ensure we create a framework through which rural Ireland can thrive and grow, which is the basis for the decision. Such an outcome cannot be achieved by telling a progressive company seeking to carve out a new role that Ministers will interfere in their day-to-day operation, as the Deputies have suggested. That is not what Ministers do and it would be inappropriate for that sort of direction to be issued by a Minister to a body trying to rebuild its strategy with long-term services for the community it lives among.

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