Danny Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The retention of the post offices we have left in rural Ireland is vital if communities are to survive. We saw what happened in the UK. They got rid of a lot of their post offices, more than half of them, and now they are trying to bring them back into existence again. We must do our best to retain the post offices we have left because they are vital to local communities. Elderly people go to the post office for their pensions and social welfare payments. I ask the Minister of State, as I have asked previously, to give more work to the post offices. It is not money they want; it is work. We have asked previously about banking services that could be operated through the post office network, a form of community banking where the profits would go back into communities. We asked the Government to do that before and we are asking again now. We cannot afford to lose any more post offices over and above those we have already lost.

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