Like my colleague, I have always been supportive of the local post office. We recognise the importance of the local post office. I have told the story in this House of how I always believed that a visit to the post office took about two and a half hours because I remember my grandmother going to collect the pension and coming back two and a half hours later. I remember one of my first visits to the post office and being astonished that I was in and out within three or four minutes unlike my grandmother who was collecting neighbourhood information and gossip while collecting the pension. That is the importance of the post office. All of us in the House recognise how important that community link is and how people meet their neighbours and friends and find out how people are doing. There is also the community notice board. The workers in the post office, whether the postmistress, postmaster or those employed by them, help to fill out forms, let people know their entitlements and download and print stuff for them. I think that type of community service is unique to this country. We have to recognise that we have to move forward and keep the post office moving forward and keep it relevant. We have hindered that quite a lot. There are additional services that could be provided by the post office, keeping it up to date, part of and embedded in the community. I have said before in this House that we need to look at our Garda stations and how we could amalgamate them with the post office. I can guarantee that very few people would rob a Garda station. We have to look at that. We see it with the postal systems in France, northern Spain and Switzerland, where post offices are delivering prescription medicine, working with their equivalents of the HSE. They are able to get prescriptions out to people who are not able to get them and who do not have carers looking after them. There is a wide range of services that could be provided with that. As I said, we welcome this but I notice that we are going from recognising €30 million to €105 million in this case. The last thing I want is to be back here in two years' time saying that we do not have enough money in our post offices and that not enough was invested. It is all very well to throw money at a situation. Government is very good at throwing money at situations but we have to get a full plan for the post office to bring it up to date and keep it relevant. We need to recognise that because of European law, people will now be taxed, or whatever you want call it, €3 on every item from these large Chinese companies like Temu and Shein. There will be serious changes when it comes to delivering small items, whether they are from Temu, abudhabi.com, Shein or whoever these providers are. There will be some challenges there in the next 12 months.

Sentiment score: 0.14