Is the demise of the rural post office in the mail?

Michael Clifford gets to the bottom of the post office closure crisis in rural Ireland and meets the faces behind the local service.

‘Our post office is more than a business, it’s a kind of social service’

Newmarket

Last August, Marian Murphy began getting accustomed to a new way of life at Newmarket Post Office. For 34 years, she rose daily and opened the premises, which is attached to her home, at 6am to let in the five postmen who delivered mail across the North Cork town and its environs.

The men sorted through their daily allocation of mail at a sorting facility to the rear of the office, heading out with their bags just as the town was coming alive.

Now each morning they get up and have to travel to Botherbue, 13km away, sort through the mail, and return to Newmarket to begin work. Their colleagues in half a dozen other towns like Knocknagree, Millstreet, Ballydesmond, and Rockchapel must do likewise. It’s all part of the centralisation of postal services initiated by An Post.

The stated reason for doing so is to improve next day delivery. In outposts like Newmarket, and similar sized towns across the state, there is suspicion that something else is at work. The centralisation of services, to those minds, has far more to do with cutting by stealth.

“We’d heard the rumour that it might be happening,” the postmaster, Ms Murphy says. “Then last August we got the letter to tell us. It makes for a big change around here. It will mean a reduction in salary of around €10,000 a year which we used to get for having the postal service.”

The dawn call is gone now for Ms Murphy, but so is the business, and it represents just one more of a whole line of services which have been stripped from the post offices in rural Ireland.

Newmarket is a town with a population of around 2,300. In the uneven uplift in the economy, it is doing alright, located as it is within commuting distance to a number of big towns and Cork and Limerick.

At 6.30am, you’d have a job crossing the main street with the procession of vehicles en route to the big population centres. Three years ago, Ms Murphy estimates, you could have walked down the centre of the road at that time of the morning and not encountered a single vehicle.

So the recovery is afoot in some places. Among post offices, often weather vanes for economic health in rural Ireland, that is not the case.

In recent years a whole slew of post offices within a dozen mile radius of the town have closed their doors. Places like Meelin, Kilbrin, Freemount, Dernagree, Tower, all are now without a post office to call their own.

There is fear for others. The woman running the post office in Knocknaree is coming up towards retirement and as of now there is no sign of somebody coming along to take up the slack.

Ballydesmond is another that looked at one point to be under threat, but the pull that accompanies the location of major local employer Munster Joinery in the town ensured that the doors stayed open.

So it goes in North Cork, an area that isn’t suffering from population decline, or disproportionate economic hardship. It just looks like the era of the local post office is coming to an end.

Marian Murphy, Newmarket, Co Cork. She and her husband Gerard reared their son and daughter in the post office, but see absolutely no prospect of either ever considering taking on the role at any point in the future.

“You’re relying on the public coming in to you,” Ms Murphy says. “But the likes of the social welfare department is encouraging people to go into the banks. And then with child benefit, they are getting the mothers before they leave the maternity hospitals to sign the forms so that the money can be transferred into bank accounts.”

So it goes with modern technology. But Ms Murphy believes that the social element of post offices is being completely ignored. There is no doubt but that the post office is one of the last bastions of spontaneous socialising in rural Ireland.

That alone is not excuse enough to ensure continuance, but the major bugbear of many in the business is that things could be different with a little reconfiguring, a little imagination, a little recognition of the role played by post offices beyond brass tacks.

“The driver licence is an obvious one,” Ms Murphy says. “We could do the payments for the State exams as well if we were let, but An Post doesn’t seem to be going out for new business. We get the impression that their only interest is the top 200 or so post offices with little consideration for the rest of us.

Marian Murphy is under the impression that An Post is only interested in the top 200 or so post offices in the country, with little consideration for the rest.

“But this is more than a business. It’s a kind of social service. You can see it here on a Friday, when people come in and meet. The days of going to each other’s houses are long behind us.”

Ms Murphy and her husband Gerard, a county councillor and former TD, took over the business in 1982. Prior to that it had passed down through two generations of the local O’Neill family, since first opening around 1910 or so.

The Murphys reared their son and daughter there, but see absolutely no prospect of either ever considering taking on the role at any point in the future.

Postmasters can no longer pass on the business to an offspring, but having been reared on a premises would no doubt be deemed an advantage in a competition to succeed. But that simply doesn’t arise. The days when running a post office was an enviable career option have long passed.

Meanwhile, one of An Post’s strategies in the current environment is to encourage post masters to locate on the premises of major retailers in rural and provincial towns.

When Ms Murphy’s husband questioned that approach, he received a response from An Post that perhaps unwittingly showed how the semi state sees its role these days.

“The presence of a post office can determine which business survives and which fails in a competitive local environment,” the letter stated. “For this reason in particular we still get a very high level of interest in our contracts to the extent that other retailers frequently offer rent free space to the postmaster to co-locate their business.”

The letter could be interpreted as offering the postmaster the choice of deciding which of two competing retailers in their town is going to survive.

An awesome responsibility, and one that most people in rural Ireland would shy away from. But that’s the world we live in now, as rural Ireland struggles against a form of decline that many believe is being handled in a cack-handed manner.

‘Most of the people doing it feel a huge responsibility’

Mallow 

Tuesdays used to be one of the busiest days of the week for Ger Long. Now it’s one of the quietest. Tuesday was when the social welfare payments for people on disability came through. Up to 80 customers used to troop into Long’s post office at Ballydaheen in Mallow, Co Cork, to collect their payments.

That’s a lot of footfall to lose in a space of months.

Tuesday was also the day that child benefit was paid. Now, the benefit largely goes directly into recipients’ bank accounts. Now, there is no need for two people to be manning the hatches for the whole day.

“On a human basis you would have thought that getting the child benefit in here was an opportunity to better appreciate it,” Long says.

“If it goes into your bank it just disappears in general spending. If you were collecting it here, you might leave it go a week or two and then you have it to pay a bill or whatever, which you could do here. There’s the social element too, meeting other mothers of fathers, getting out of the house for those who don’t work outside the home.”

Long is philosophical about the services lost and others that could be gained for those in the post office business. He, after all, has seen the business from all sides. For nigh on 30 years he was an employee of An Post, starting out as a clerk on the counter in the company’s office in Mallow — with which he is now in competition himself.

Just under five years ago, when he was 50-years-of-age, he left his permanent pensionable job and applied to take up the reins at the Ballydaheen franchise. He saw opportunity where others saw a sunset business. More than though, he demonstrated that the pull of the safe job can be countered by a chance to be self employed in a sector where he had acquired some knowledge.

“I had civil service status because I was working there before An Post went semi state in the late 1980s,” he says. “But I saw an opportunity, and where I was things had changed and they wanted me to go back on the counter. I didn’t really want to do that, but look at me now, I’m on the counter but at least I’m working for myself.”

Ger Long, Ballydaheen, Mallow, Co Cork.

Long’s final two years in An Post were spent auditing for the company throughout the Kerry-Cork region. If you want to know every nook and cranny in the state, every townland you never knew existed, every place name that sounds more Aboriginal than Celtic, spend a few months visiting the nation’s post offices.

“Some of the people who do it are amazing,” he says. “There was a woman in north Kerry, and I’m not exaggerating, but every time she was audited she had the books balanced to within one single cent.

“Most of the people doing it feel a huge responsibility to their local areas. There were women in their 80s running some of the places I used to visit. And some of those areas are really in the middle of nowhere. There was one post office in a place down there outside Bandon which I’d never even heard of before.”

Long’s work showed him the struggles that those in the smaller outlets are enduring. To observe which way the wind was blowing, he had only to look at developments in Mallow.

When he started, Mallow was regional HQ for around 60 post offices. Now the regional office has been abandoned and matters are directed from Cork city and the number in the same area is down around 40.

He believes that even with the best will in the world, there is no way that some of those that remain will survive. Viability is simply too big a problem.

But he does see a future for post offices. The deals struck with AIB to lodge or withdraw cash is the kind of thing he’d like to see expanded. He can’t understand how An Post didn’t tender for the driving licence contract (it did but was unsuccessful). More than anything he would like to see a little imagination applied to drawing in more business.

Outside his post office, he has fashioned a homemade sign advertising that AIB customers can do their cash business inside.

He expects that he will be told to remove this as no such adds are allowed.

“An Post is not proactive in promoting its services,” he says. “We could do with a lot more of that.”

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One example he cites as a successful innovation is the address pal, a variance in the parcel motel model which accommodates a direct form of post for parcels.

“We need to incentivise people to come in,” he said. “Little things can be done. Like giving a voucher for the first pension payment people pick up here. There’s a huge social element still attached to the post office.

“We need to make the most of that to ensure that there is a viable future for at least most post offices in business.”