Pauline Tully (Sinn Fein)

I live in a rural area of County Cavan, about 3 miles from the village of Kilnaleck. Some 12 or 13 years ago, there was a branch of Ulster Bank with an ATM that was open all hours, a branch of Cavan Credit Union and a post office in the town.Now, there are none of those. There was an ATM service provided through one of the shops when the ownership changed, so at least that is there during opening hours. The post office there was one of the 257 that have closed in the past decade. It is one of seven that closed in Cavan, all in rural areas. The reason given at the time by An Post for the closure was that there were under 500 people living in the village. It ignored, however, the fact there were 5,000 people living in a 5 km hinterland of that village, that there were 40 businesses in and around the village and about the same number within a couple of miles of the village. It resulted in people having to travel to one or the other of two nearby towns to access post office services. With that, they took their business out of the village. They were not going to collect their pension or whatever other payment through the post office and then come back into Kilnaleck to do their shopping, go for their cup of coffee or whatever it might be. The whole village suffered as a result of that and business was lost from the village.

A post office is important. It offers financial services, access to social welfare and communications infrastructure. That was really important in my area because there were a lot of people from eastern Europe working in and around the village over the past 20 years. They used the post office on a continual basis to contact home and send money home and so forth. They could not do that anymore. They had to then travel and most of them do not have cars. They had to rely on public transport to get to another village to use the post office.

The Minister of State said himself there is a social aspect to the post office. He is correct in that, but we should actually respect that. We need to see the outdated contract terms changed. When the postmaster or postmistress is retiring, the post office closes because it is not attracting new entrants. We need to see a new contract and new approach. We need to see increased investment. The Irish Postmasters' Union have stated that if the investment of €75 million over the next five years, that is, €15 million a year, is not provided, the future for the post office network is bleak. With increased investment, we need to see new initiatives like increased banking services or support for different Government schemes. There was almost a concerted effort to move from post offices to banks for social welfare payments. We need to see that reversed. Post offices contribute approximately €767 million to the social and economic value of our country as well. We have to keep that in mind.

It is worth comparing with our EU counterparts. France invests 270% more in its post office network than we do. Belgium invests 500% more and Italy invests 340% more. We need to learn from those.