‘I’ll miss it, meeting friendly people’: Postmistress on closure of West Cork of branch

She can’t be absolutely sure of the exact date but Eileen Kelly, the outgoing postmistress in Allihies in West Cork, thinks that the village post office has been operating since around 1909.

The postmistress all those years ago was her own grandmother, Mary.

That makes Eileen, 65, the third generation to operate the post office in the Beara peninsula village, a prominent beach centre and tourist retreat.

However, come next January, she is retiring and with that, the office at Cluin will close.

“I was looking up the 1911 Census when it was published and she [her grandmother] was there then,” says Eileen.

“There was a post office before but it was not in these premises, it was elsewhere in the village.”

Eileen worked in the post office for six years before taking on the senior role and has worked there for at least 43 years.

She says she has never found herself in the midst of any extraordinary events in the locality, but she has seen a lot of changes.

“Technology,” she says.

“People are using online more and direct debits.

“I would say most young people do a lot of things online, but I would still have a lot of loyal customers.

“They pop in for the usual things, like paying bills, banking transactions, social welfare payments.”

But, she says, there have been fewer of them: “Our population is dropping, it is as low as it ever was.”

For many people opposed to post office closures, this is a key point — that the post office is more than a building from which you can collect the pension.

It is a meeting point in the community, a place for hearing the news.

Eileen decided to accept the offer from An Post — “not a fantastic offer” — and it sounds like she does have some misgivings.

“I have been telling people for the last couple of months, so it is no shock.

“I think people are glad for me,” she says. “They are sorry it is going but they know where I am coming from.”

Under the An Post plan, any post office that closes must have another within a 15km radius.

In the case of Allihies, that is Eyeries.

An Post has the distance at 10.9km, but Eileen seems unsure and turns away from the phone and asks: “How far is Eyeries from here?”

The answer, in reality, is close enough.

Eyeries postmistress Mary Harrington said “time will tell” whether there is a sudden burst of new customers there when the Allihies post office closes at the end of next January and she admitted regarding the closures: “It’s not good for the rural areas, really.”

Yet everyone seems supportive of Eileen’s decision.

She says she feels sorry for some customers who will have to organise to switch their business elsewhere, hence the long lead-in time.

“I just felt that I wanted to give people time to set up what they want to set up.

“I will miss it,” she says. “Meeting people. Friendly people.”