Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In fairness, they were. This is, again, no reflection on the Minister of State, Deputy Butler. I am pleased she is here. The Departments were in contact. They asked me which Department and I helped in their interpretation and said any of the four I have indicated. Funnily enough, and call me old fashioned, I did not mention the Department of Health and specifically did not mention mental health. That is for others to determine.

I want to talk about post offices, which as the House will be aware have been under threat for many years. Consecutive governments of all colours and none have paid lip service. We have gone to the public meetings, we have listened and we have done the three bags full, but we have continued to close them, digitise, strip out services and so on.

Next week, the postmasters' union will contemplate whether to take industrial action and withdraw services. Meanwhile we had a very detailed Grant Thornton report published in 2020. The shortfall is only €17 million for a service the report indicates gives a value to the communities of between €335 million and €750 million. These are hardly snake oil claims from an unknown company because the Government subcontracts many of its decisions to companies just like Grant Thornton.

I have some suggestions. The Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, was given specific responsibility last year, having trawled through all Government agencies in the Departments, to see what additional work we could give to post offices. As the Minister of State will see, the Ceann Comhairle will agree, and Deputies who are here a hundred years, such as Deputy Ring, will have seen hundreds of times before, there are more questions on the Question Paper today to do with passport applications than in the history of the State. Twenty years ago, when I came here first, there was a drop box out at Leinster House, and when we came in we would put in the applications. If there was a problem, you would get a call, you would get it dealt with and you would be going home to the west on a Thursday evening with the passport for whatever family. Now we have gone in reverse. There is an additional €10 million in the budget, 300 more staff but still there is one child in my neighbourhood waiting eight months for a passport.

I will make an outrageous proposal that we look, as we have often done in the past, to the UK where they have a check and send proposal for UK passports for which the postmaster gets £16 or, if we convert it at today's rate, approximately €19.20. This would go a long way to help the many families throughout the country with basic errors. The postmaster could say the date is wrong, the signature by the garda is in the wrong place or the consent form is not uploaded correctly. We could have a level 1 checking system instead of pallets of post in Balbriggan or, for the Munster passport applications, in Cork. No doubt the public would quite happily pay a score for the purpose so that they would not have to cancel the holiday or miss the loved one's funeral or so they could get medical attention on the cross-border scheme or whatever else.

I suggest to the Minister of State, Deputy Naughton, on whom the postmasters' union has been waiting since before Christmas to come back to it, that here is one tangible measure with which not one Deputy in this House or Senator in the Seanad would disagree. Let the post office do a level 1 check on all applications and help applicants to upload digitally. Then we could, in the words of some of my own intelligence officers in the Passport Office, take up to four days' work off an individual application as they are currently being processed.

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