Dáil debates

Wednesday, 21 October 2020

Post Office Network: Motion [Private Members]

 

11:30 am

Photo of Michael FitzmauriceMichael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak and commend the Regional Group on bringing this motion forward. In the previous Dáil, Deputies Danny and Michael Healy-Rae and the Rural Independent Group brought forward a motion on this matter and nothing was done. I am critical of the IPU. I will be straight about that. I warned two years ago that the ordinary postmaster and postmistress never got an opportunity to see the legal advice on the new contracts being signed. They were rammed down their throats at the time and they were told to either sign them or forget about it. That was the beginning of where we are today.

If one is in business, one has to be looking at new opportunities. As was pointed out earlier, 700 people are being taken on by DPD. If An Post were cute at it, it would be ahead of the posse because that opportunity was there for the company as well. An Post would rather go around in big vans telling us it has gone carbon-neutral with electric vans than decide how to have a good banking model or bring in new initiatives to keep it viable in different areas. We have to get the public on board. We have to bring things into the post office network that will entice people to go in that door. We have to make sure it is like a new service and is promoted but An Post seems to keep playing the same tune the whole time thinking it is going to get a different result. That will not work.

We need post offices. They are not just about the post, letters, pensions or so on. No one living in a large city understands what a post office means in a rural community where someone might not see another person for a full week. People who might not have heard a word all week will go in and learn who died or who had a child or whatever went on in the area. It is about being able to speak to someone for the first time in maybe a full week for their mental health and well-being. If it is only for that, given the number of suicides we have seen around the country, we need to sit down and put a plan in place. We cannot have this patch job of doing it year to year. Let us do it for the future.

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