Elves at Post Office working overtime as post bags swell to 7.5m items per day

“The handwriting is so bad — but at this time of the year you have to smile a little wider.” So says postman Denis McCarthy as he wades through the sea of letters and parcels.

It’s all hands to the pump at An Post’s Delivery Services Unit in Ballinacurra outside Midleton, where the madness begins at 6.30am.

The automated sorting machine at Cork’s Little Island central depot often can’t read colourful Christmas card envelopes, meaning more work for staff, who hand-sort the Christmas mail.

Denis, who lives close to his route in Shanagarry and Ladysbridge, stands at his sorting station and holds up some particularly hard-to-decipher cards. “Some of these are very hard to read,” he says with a smile.

Although there is less mail now than there was in the pre-digital era, the volume of mail nationally still soars at this time of year, from around 2.5m items being handled per day by An Post in other seasons to 7.5m items per day in the weeks before Christmas.

An Post’s parcel delivery figures have grown by 22% per year for the last two years because of the rise in popularity of online shopping.

“Our letter and card business has certainly dropped, but places like Amazon, Boohoo and Smyth’s toys are making us very busy for parcels,” says Mary Farrell, the southern operations manager with An Post.

An Post also handles mail for one eagerly-awaited VIP; children who posted their Santa letters and included a return address can expect a reply in the mail in the coming days.

It’s not only children who need reminding to use a return address.

“Often people are only writing to people once a year if they’re sending cards, and often they don’t have the correct address,” Mary Farrell says.

“If they don’t include a return address we’ve no way of finding them. We have a huge number of cards left in January and all they say is ‘Best Wishes’.”

John O’Brien, the parcel delivery man, is loading up a postal van with an enormous array of boxes in all different sizes and shapes, as the sun is just rising.

From bikes and dolls houses to car parts and even drums of oil, John’s round sees him deliver an enormous variety of goods to both domestic and commercial customers.

“You see the plain brown boxes over there? They’re from Smyth’s toys. They used to just send out the items, but of course children might be home when the parcels were being delivered and they could see the toys’ packaging, so now they all go out in plain cardboard.”

David Keeler, the acting manager, is used to handling mail from all over the world, but he knows what type of parcel he likes the least: Food packages.

“The stink can be horrendous!” he said.

“Sometimes they’ve taken weeks to travel here, and if no one is home, they could be here for another 16 days waiting for collection. Imagine putting something like that in your van and driving around all day.We literally used to get people posting turkeys before, with a little label tied around their leg. Now everything has to be properly packaged.”

An Post is running a full delivery service today, with all post offices also open. There’s also a domestic express mail service and the latest date of posting for that is Monday.