I thank the Minister of State for taking this debate today. Like other speakers, I commend our local post office network in County Clare and the huge number of postmen and postwomen around this country, one of whom is my brother-in-law, Gearóid. They do an incredible job. You would want to see Gearóid's phone at times and the text messages that come in with appreciation or asking how he is doing. He has formed a great relationship and rapport with the people whose doors he drives up to and walks up to each day to deliver post. That is so typical of what happens right across rural Ireland. The consolidation of post offices has utterly failed over the last few years. An Post brought in a rule whereby every household in rural Ireland should be theoretically within 15 km of a local post office. When the application of that rule came into play, we saw the closure of many post offices, including those in Carrigaholt, Cratloe and Broadford. Even urban post offices are closing. It is to the absolute detriment of the community because post offices are hubs where so much activity goes on. In addition to carrying out financial transactions, buying stamps and collecting pensions, people go to their local post office as a form of social interaction in rural Ireland. To see these post offices closing is absolutely devastating. There is a bit of a lottery to the 15 km rule. If the postmaster or postmistress becomes ill or wants to retire, the post office becomes a target for closure and you can start to draw your 15 km circles around it. That is the reverberating impact of all of this. We need to do a little reset on that because the numbers stack up to 250 closures over the past decade alone and 78% of those closures are in rural Ireland. I am glad to see the annual subvention for post offices in the programme for Government. It is something I campaigned for quite rigorously alongside Councillor Tom O'Callaghan, a colleague of mine in County Clare. That is in the programme for Government and it is happening but, in itself, it is not enough. There are other models of post offices globally we should be looking at. Under the incredible Kiwibank model in New Zealand, a whole range of services bring people in beyond the doors of the post office to buy more than stamps - they bank with them, save with them and do all of these fabulous transactions. That is what keeping things sustained there. I think we need to look at that model. I will speak briefly about Carrigaholt post office. A GoFundMe page has raised a huge amount of money there. That is to be commended but that is not where things should be at. This annual fund needs to be more than an annual fund. We need a sustainable pathway for post offices. If you want to see what that would look like, Councillor Tom O'Callaghan submitted an incredible template for how that could work, policy wise, for the Government. I hope that can be taken on board.

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