Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I agree entirely. A very high proportion of those who are signing the petition or who are getting involved in the campaign are older people. It is a community focal point for many people who go to the post office on a weekly basis to get their bits and pieces done, and to meet and chat with people. Again, everyone speaks so highly of those workers, who are now being put in a very difficult situation.

As I predicted, the Minister of State read out a sentence about how An Post has indicated that nothing will change in terms of the service model.

Again, I say to the Minister of State and the Minister, who will hopefully read the transcript, that I have the email correspondence from An Post which clearly states that it is not committing to keeping the same number of staff or the same number of counters. In what world does that amount to a guarantee that the same services are going to be provided to the community?

What is happening is that there is a long-term agenda to significantly reduce the number of An Post branches throughout the country. As long as they are directly run by it, which 10% are, An Post cannot politically do that because it is very difficult to shut down a post office. There will be a community response based around older people and others who use post offices and An Post will be forced back. There is a two-stage process. First, An Post washes its hands of the post office and tells people not to worry. It states that everything will be the same and that the post office will be run by a contractor. Second, either An Post says the post office is no longer financially viable -that is definitely not the case when it comes to Tallaght because it must be one of the busiest post offices in the country - the postmaster dies or something else happens. I have also seen this in the context of Rathfarnham. The Government says that all of this has nothing to do with it.

This is about running down our national network of post office branches. We should be opposing it and the Government should be opposing it. An Post should withdraw this proposal. Exactly the same points could be made about Rathmines, Phibsborough, New Ross, Tipperary and Roscommon, given that the same sort of campaigns have been run there and the same issues exist. I appeal to An Post, even at this late stage, to withdraw the plan.

See this speech in context