David Cullinane (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for her lengthy response and take the opportunity to record my praise for the post office in winning the contract. Hopefully, post offices will benefit from it for a long number of years, not just the six.

My concerns and those of my party can be dismissed cheaply by the Minister if she so wishes. That is fair enough. I am not all that interested. However, I am articulating concerns that have been raised with me by people who work in the post office sector, the trade union involved and service users. It is their concerns I ask the Minister to address, not just those of Fianna Fáil or Sinn Féin. I agree that there are certain parties who are very good at scaremongering. In her response to my contribution, the Minister misrepresented the Sinn Féin position absolutely, which is what she tends to do. She waffled on about things neither my party nor I ever said.

She referred to a concern Senator Kathryn Reilly raised on Second Stage, however, and said it would be a disaster. I agree. It could be a disaster if, at a future date, An Post did not get the contract but some other provider did. Senator Mooney hit the nail on the head when he talked about Europe. If we cut right to the chase, we have had for a long number of years a threat to public services and a liberalisation of the market coming from Europe. That has been happening consistently in a whole range of areas. I see this as part of the same drift. The Minister and the Government are in essence hiding behind the threat of court action to implement European policy. That is what is happening here. Competition is good and it can be healthy but what we are seeing from Europe across a range of areas is the distortion of the competition argument to the advantage of larger business, including multi-nationals. Smaller networks such as post offices and credit unions can be the losers in that.

Our concerns are not baseless. When I say "our", I include the Irish Postmasters Union, postmasters themselves and others who work in the post office sector. While I am sure they are very happy they got the contract this time around, there is a concern that they will not always have it. It is open to this Government or any future Administration to award the contract to somebody else. That would spell disaster for post offices. Our concerns are well founded. There is no difficulty in giving a preference to post offices. If we do not, it goes right to the heart of what Senator Mooney spoke about, namely, the drift in European policy in recent times to promote competition above the provision of core public services. It is something I certainly do not believe in and I did not think the Labour Party did either. Of course, we have been proven wrong about that over the last number of years. The electorate have certainly seen that and will see it again for some time to come.