The Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, will be aware that the postal services have been crippled with closures and cutbacks. Since 2015 a total of 34 post offices have been closed in Cork, the vast majority of which were in rural areas. The shocking number of closures has also resulted in threats to other community services. I will give the example of Ballynoe. It had a shop that was part of the post office. It did the local newspapers and it was beside the pub. Since that post office closed, they have nothing in that village. What makes it worse is that people now have to get a taxi into Midleton, maybe 7, 8 or 9 miles away, to draw their pension. This is happening all over place. Ballycotton is another village with no shop and no post office. It is just ripping the heart out of rural Ireland. During Covid I spoke to two postmen - not postwomen - who explained to me that on their rounds, they delivered two letters to two elderly people every week that they wrote to themselves. The only people they would see during the Covid lockdown were the postmen. That is another vital little cog in the wheel when talking about post office closures. I want to raise the fact that back in 2011 Sinn Féin highlighted that a public service obligation arrangement would be needed to save the post offices. We mentioned expanding the services. I have met with the Irish Postmasters' Union. I worked with two postmasters over the past number of years, one of whom has since retired. We need to get Government services, the credit unions, driving licences and so on into the post office. The post office is not just some place people go into to post a letter and that is it. We have heard the cliché "the computer says No". This is what I hear when talking to postmasters. Not so much in the towns but in the countryside post offices are a meeting place for people who come in once a week to draw their pension, get a bottle of milk and a sliced pan because normally the post office is the shop and everything else. The postmaster is also the counsellor and the advice giver. A machine will not help people fill out an application form. I think we have lost sight of that. A number of years ago, just after Covid, we were talking here about the parcel service. They were trying to close the parcel service in Little Island in Cork. That service was dealing with more parcels than Portlaoise and Athlone together. I cannot see the logic of trying to fix something that is not broken. If we do not have dialogue and we do not talk to people, then we do not get information so we cannot act on it and cannot get the results. I ask the Government to look seriously at the public service obligation and support the postmasters. The pay has to be increased because it is not attractive anymore.

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