Eamon Ryan (Dublin South, Green Party)

The vision I have is of a new, renovated postal service that addresses in particular the needs of rural Ireland, including the 40% of houses which are one-off houses. A whole range of new services can open up, if we have the right system, to get products to those houses in a cost-effective, customer-friendly way. The development of Internet technologies is particularly relevant to this. A slow but inexorable change is occurring, which we should not resist but should be grasping. We should ask ourselves how we can use new technologies to deliver services, particularly in areas that do not have the advantage of scale that exists in Dublin city or Cork city.

I should not use this analogy, but people were being very lyrical earlier. One of the songs my father sings is "There's Only One Street in Dromcolliher", which many people know. I took this to heart, asking myself why Dromcolliher should not have access to everything in the world through a physical access system that allows it to rival high-street London. The task is to create a distribution system, particularly for rural Ireland, that is suitable for the 21st century and reduces isolation, and in turn creates business opportunities for whichever companies provide part of the new access network.

On the question of how the new system would work, I do not think we should be prescriptive, because everything is evolving, including Internet technologies and new markets and processes. More than 30 companies are already authorised, some of them from end to end and some of them dealing with specialised processes within certain sections of the access system. Rather than being prescriptive, as this amendment is, we should provide a fair and independent oversight of any new commercial arrangements so we can prevent cherry picking, which would undermine the ability of An Post to do its business, while allowing new business opportunities to evolve. I am sorry if that is a long-winded and somewhat lyrical explanation, but we must come at it this way. We must see this as an opportunity to be grasped rather than something to resist.

A number of months ago we brought together workers in this area, people from other businesses, people with an interest in An Post, regulators, and people from my Department for a full-day round-table discussion in which we considered various scenarios. For example, we considered what would happen if mail volume dropped by 50%, which is not such an incredible scenario in view of the continuing expansion of e-mail. It was interesting to hear the views of people who worked in the industry. When I was a young person, postal workers did a whole range of things for the local community. People would ask Paddy Joe to bring something back for them the next day, and it worked in an effective way. We need to commercialise a distribution system such as this to provide a real revenue stream for An Post. However, it is not just for An Post; it will work better when there is a range of different players operating in an evolved and complex new postal system which provides a whole range of business services.

Staying where we are is not an option; that would just lead to a contraction which would make businesses unviable and would not serve the public in the end. There is a certain urgency to this change, particularly for the 40% of houses in rural Ireland that are one-off houses. We may be able to create a new access system that overcomes some of the isolation of such housing.