I welcome the Bill and the additional investment in An Post. There is a fundamental problem with An Post and it is why week after week we hear Deputies rightly complain in here about post offices closing, sorting offices moving and the terrible treatment of pensioners in An Post. The fundamental issue at the heart of it all is the so-called commercial mandate for An Post. An Post has to legally behave like a company that is solely focused on profit despite the reality that it is a public and community service and should be seen as such, and that should be its priority. Because it is not, many decisions are taken to the detriment of workers, communities and pensioners. I want to talk about two aspects of An Post. One is the relocation of sorting offices and the other is the treatment of An Post pensioners. The Minister of State took a Topical Issue from the TDs in our constituency. I had to miss it for some good reason. The Topical Issue was about the move of the sorting office in Edmondstown, which serves Dublin 16, to a superhub in Lucan, coincidentally beside the Amazon warehouse, supposedly to prioritise parcels. Added to that, also in our constituency, is the move of the Tallaght sorting office from the centre of Tallaght to the superhub in Lucan. The communities are up in arms about it, and rightly so. This will be a disaster. It will be a disaster for workers. Workers have told us they live in the area and do not drive a car. They cycle to the sorting office and then do their route, and will not be able to travel from Dublin 16 to Lucan on a daily basis. The new hub is 17 km from the Edmondstown sorting offices and 11 km from the one in Tallaght. For workers who do not drive, that is out. Even if they do drive, their quality of life and life at work will get worse. A large proportion of the working day will be spent sitting on the M50 on the way to and from Lucan, rather than primarily delivering post, talking to people, etc. People will spend hours of their working day in traffic as opposed to delivering post. The impact on residents will be a dramatically worsened service. More staff will have to be involved in delivery, and in theory that is something that can be done. The issue that we cannot take account of, however, is that the traffic on the M50 is different on any given day. On some days there will be a big pile-up on the M50 and, therefore, routes will not be completed. Post and packages will go back to Lucan at the end of the day. The service for residents in Tallaght and Dublin 16 will be worse. The biggest issue, however, is one the Minister of State can imagine himself. People miss deliveries; we all do. We know our local sorting office because it is the place we go to get a package when it has been missed and we get a delivery slip. People living in Tallaght or Dublin 16 who miss a package will have to travel to Lucan. It is crazy. People who do not have a car will have to take a bus from Rathfarnham or Tallaght into town and out to Lucan, and back again, a journey of two to three hours. Even those in a better situation who have a car will find it hard. It is difficult enough for people to go to sorting offices to collect parcels, never mind driving all the way to Lucan. The inconvenience will be immense. An Post has said behind the scenes that it will make arrangements with local post offices to make sure packages can be collected. We have spoken to local post offices that have told us they do not have the space or opening hours to do that and that there has been no contact with them to make this happen. We are being lulled to sleep by An Post saying not to worry and that this will be fine, but ultimately it will not be fine. A mother living in Dublin South-West spoke about the impact of this on her. She is the parent of a child with additional needs. She does not drive and said having a local An Post delivery office is not simply a convenience but essential. She said she relies on being able to access postal services close to home and that travelling further to collect missed deliveries or resolve delivery issues would be extremely difficult. She said caring for a child with additional needs already involves attending appointments, managing therapies and balancing many daily responsibilities. Without access to a car, she said, any additional journey by public transport or on foot creates extra stress and practical challenges, in particular when travelling with her child. This is a huge issue and it is why in Dublin 16 we had a well-attended public meeting and, a few weeks ago, a very well-attended protest. Over 4,000 people have signed a petition against the move of the Dublin 16 post office, and we are just getting started with the campaign in Tallaght. We will hold a public meeting next Monday night in Tallaght, which I believe will also be well attended. The result is that the campaign is having an impact. An Post has now said that, due to time constraints, it is staggering the consolidation of Fonthill in Tallaght. It also said that because it would take a number of weeks for the offices to settle in the new surroundings so close to the very busy Christmas peak period, it has taken the decision to defer the move of the Edmondstown and Tallaght sorting offices to quarter 1 of 2027. We have forced back the decision, but this is not the answer. Going back to quarter 1 of 2027 provides a six-month reprieve. The move was to happen in quarter 3 of 2026. That is not what we are looking for. The plan has to go off the table. There are other issues with sorting offices across the country, but this is a major issue. There will be a large meeting in Tallaght on Monday night. We will then propose to bring the campaigns together and protest outside the Dáil in September to show that this is not acceptable. Fundamentally, this is a political issue. The Minister of State needs to tell An Post it is not a runner and does not make sense. To be clear, the buildings where the sorting offices are currently located are fully operational. Ironically, after moving the Edmondstown office to Lucan the plan is to move a Dublin 14 sorting office, currently located in Churchtown, to the old building. From the point of view of workers and residents, this proposal, which I believe is about prioritising Amazon over people, needs to be dropped. Regarding An Post pensioners, we have a scandalous situation where workers who transferred over to An Post and gave huge service to the company and to the communities they served were given guarantees about the value of their pension not being diminished and so on. All those guarantees, which supposedly exist in law, have been broken and now they are going into pension poverty. There is an incredible situation whereby a cap on these pensions means they can rise by only 2% a year. The cost-of-living crisis we have seen over recent years has led to people's real income being massively eroded, and workers are expected to just accept it. If we continue on the trajectory we are on, the State pension, inadequate as it is, will actually surpass the An Post pension for many workers. That is no way to treat people who were working directly for the State before being transferred to An Post. They have been left in a situation of deepening and worsening pension poverty. We all know what the rates of inflation have been over the past few years. Two of the workers, Mr. Paul Moreland and Mr. John Hearn, appeared before the Joint Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport in May. They put the case extremely well in terms of how poorly An Post pensioners are being treated. That situation must be rectified.

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