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

I thank the Independent Group for bringing the motion forward today. It is nice to have a commonsense approach. It is the Irish way here to try to fix something that is not broken. It beggars belief that we could have a private company doing this because 99% of the time privatisation equals profit; it is not about providing proper service. As previous speakers have mentioned, there are 950 post offices in the country. It beggars belief that we are in here talking about this and trying to reverse something that could possibly have grown better.

The PSC was also mentioned. In the last Dáil term I had a good few arguments with the then Minister, Senator Regina Doherty on this. I could see it was going to cause problems. I cannot figure out why they cannot simplify it. We all have a PPS number that is registered to the database. That should be good enough. We are having similar issues with medical cards at the moment but that is a different situation.

I welcome the motion's common-sense approach to going back to the way we used to do it, which worked. People forget that those with disabilities struggle even more to access these services. One-to-one interaction makes a difference as does walking in to a service where we can actually deal with a real human being. Other speakers have also said that this is public money. It beggars belief how we can privatise a system. It seems to be just systemic for successive Governments to take everything away, privatise it and come back in a few years scratching their heads and wondering why it has gone so wrong. We should be investing in our own people and our own services.

It is madness that the centres cannot take cash. They are making it so difficult for people. Others mentioned online services. How many debates have we had here about broadband? Some people are not computer literate. Someone might have the old provisional licence, might have been working on a farm the past 40 years and might never have turned on a computer. How are they going to manage? It is ludicrous that we have private companies running this when we have a national post office network that is crying out for public services and that should be supported.

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