Pa Daly (Kerry, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It seems barely a week goes by without us discussing more decline in rural life in Ireland. It is important we are having this discussion about post offices, which often remain the only focal point in some villages. We are stuck in an awful cycle of depopulation, downgrading of services, lack of investment, employment and then more depopulation. In the Listowel-north County Kerry area we have seen the threat to the SouthDoc service, the removal of dental services, the closure of the Courts Service office and now the removal of a Garda superintendent from the area. After talking for years about Shannon liquefied natural gas, LNG, rather than doing anything about it, the Government's idea now is just to introduce a task force which will kick the problem of depopulation and lack of employment further down the line.

I have said before we cannot hope to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic on the cheap, and investment in rural communities will help our spatial strategy, environment and aid public health. Rather than removing services such as the pension and social welfare during the pandemic, post offices have been further disadvantaged by removal of the passport service and by the online service which is taking longer. Consequently, post offices are losing more business. In the new contract, the top-up payments have been removed from the beginning of this month and that is another disadvantage for anyone minded to stay in business.

There is a way to improve services, as was revealed in the recent reports. While the €8.5 million is welcome, that is over 18 months rather than what was recommended by Grant Thornton, which was €17 million over 12 months. Thus in effect, only one third of the recommended amount is to be provided to post offices. A proper public service obligation should be the cornerstone of this approach, as we have seen recently with County Kerry's regional airport. This would help people of working age either to relocate or locate in County Kerry and be confident they would be able to access postal services when working from home. E-commerce businesses depend on postal services and we should not deprive budding start-up businesses of the ability to avail of services. Other ideas such as the green hub mentioned earlier and navigating State forms online would be helpful.

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