Martin Mansergh (Fianna Fail)

I want to focus on one issue, namely, improving the viability of rural post offices through automation. This is a tale of two post offices, one urban, one rural. The urban post office is smaller in terms of space and just up the road from my house in Killiney, which is not a disadvantaged place. It has recently been automated and business has increased by about 40%. I contrast this with the post office in Newcastle, County Tipperary, which is a fine village and very close to where Liam Lynch fell at the end of the Civil War fighting for the republican ideal. The nearest village, Ardfinnan, is about seven miles away while Clonmel is nine. The post office is important to this vibrant village which has a new crèche and whose GAA club is inclusive and covers many sports not directly related to Gaelic games. There are insidious pressures on post offices to close and rationalise. I understand this post office has difficulty obtaining the forms for manual operation.

We have recently published the national spatial strategy. We are also concerned about meeting our Kyoto Protocol targets. Surely we want people in villages not to have to make unnecessary journeys to places seven or nine miles away. A village like Newcastle is not asking for an industry nor even for decentralisation, merely an automated post office. I have been invited to a conference in Connacht entitled, Rural Ireland: Connecting to the Future, about the benefits of technology for people living in rural areas where the benefit is possibly even greater than in a town where one only has to go to the next bus stop down the road to find another larger post office.

I appeal to the Government on this issue because it has a responsibility to have what is called across the water "joined up" government where the left hand knows what the right hand is doing. On the one hand, there is not much point in the Minister, Deputy Ó Cuív, working hard on rural development while, on the other, State agencies are closing vital facilities in villages.

I am an admirer of An Post and Mr. Hynes as they do a good job, but I ask him to re-examine the position where people are keen and raring to make viable something which will make a real and substantial difference to a village such as Newcastle and, I am sure, dozens of other villages.