As the Minister and Ministers of State will be aware, we have a contraction of services across rural Ireland, and it is not just the post offices. It is other services as well. All these things go hand in glove. Across my rural community, I have seen many post offices over the past decade close. It removes that central piece of contact from the rural community. The Minister talked about the services that are provided and praised people who are in the post office service and the work they are doing and all of that. All that is valid. The reality, however, is that for most people who are acting as postmaster or postmistress, the contract they have at the moment is not viable when that has to change hands. That is the problem we have. I saw it recently in Carrick-On-Shannon where quite a large post office had to close down because the postmistress said she was not doing it anymore. It simply was not viable under the contract that was in place, and the only place it could go was into a large shop, which had that alternative or added service to it. Stand-alone post offices seem to be a thing of the past. For many people in rural areas, that means the post office is going to be a thing of the past. What we are talking about here is ensuring we have a service in place that will enhance and develop rural communities to be sustainable into the future. There is population decline in many rural parishes across the country. We see that with football clubs amalgamating, post offices closing, other services being removed, Garda stations, etc. We could go down the list. What we need to do is arrest that. This spiral downwards has to be stopped, and we have to try to get it to spiral upward again. The only way we can do that is for Government to take a keen interest in ensuring that services that are vital to people's lives are kept in place. That means they will have to be invested in and that contracts in place will have to be viable for a person to take up the position of postmaster or postmistress. It will also mean investment in the network and ensuring the services that are provided by the Government are easily available to people through the post office network. The Ministers need to wake up and realise that talking nice about it does not resolve the problem.

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