Pat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Regional Group of Independents for bringing forward this motion again and our own Deputy O'Rourke for putting our amendment forward. I welcome the majority of the Minister of State's response. Much of the PSO aspect has been covered but this is about the vital nature and the seriousness of losing a service like the post office in any town, village or city. It is just unbelievable. The social impact of it is huge. We have heard about the banking sector and so on, but a banking machine will not advise a person on how to fill out an application form whereas post office staff will.

In many rural areas we have lost the pubs and the Garda stations. The weekly visit to the post office to collect their old age pension is an opportunity for some people actually to engage with others. In my very brief time I will add something which arose at the Sub-Committee on Mental Health a number of weeks ago. We were discussing rural services and I came across one individual who told me that during Covid they wrote to themselves so that the postman or woman would actually visit once a week. That is the kind of service you do not get in any other industry. I commend An Post on what it has done. Certainly during Covid when everything was kind of shut down, An Post services continued and the postmen and women were still delivering free newspapers to people and interacting with them. As such there is a bigger picture here when it comes to the actual full social and economic impact of An Post and the kind of services it provides.

This was a worthy motion for the Regional Group to bring back to the table because it is certainly a service we cannot afford to lose in this country. We would be losing much more than just a little postage stamp or little parcel at the door. It is about the whole impact of it. Mention was made as well of all the other services which can be tied into it. We must support the post office network.

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