Politicians not getting message

ANY post office closure is deeply disappointing, especially to the local community, but when hundreds are closing across rural Ireland something has to be radically wrong.

Over the past four years, 400 postmasters and post mistresses up and down the country closed their doors to the public. While some retired on age grounds, in most cases they felt they could no longer make ends meet on the falling income from their waning business.

For families involved with the service for decades, the effect can be traumatic. But it is matched by the social damage inflicted on local communities by the loss of yet another essential service.

In remote parts of the country the post office is usually the last vestige of a once flourishing but fast withering social fabric.

Rural Ireland is dying from a thousand cuts as services and people vanish from the countryside.

Farmers are leaving the land in droves. State bodies like the gardaí and An Post are becoming more centralised and withdrawing from rural areas. The perplexing thing is that this is happening at the same time as the government is fighting an uphill battle to decentralise the civil service from Dublin.

This bleak scenario explains why the Irish Postmasters’ Union (IPU) has decided, following a series of regional meetings, to field a number of candidates in the upcoming General Election.

Their political campaign will get under way later this month with a street protest in Dublin at which they plan to highlight what they see as the crisis facing the Republic’s post office network.

According to the IPU, more than 300 members left the business over the last two years and more post offices are expected to close.

Union secretary John Kane said: “The network has been seriously threatened — it has gone down from 1,750 post offices in 2001 to less than 1,300 today, and it’s still falling.”

They accuse this Government of not taking the necessary steps to ensure services like social welfare payments, TV licences, and post office savings can be retained. And they claim An Post lacks the will to tackle this problem.

Postmasters argue that no other group in the country is paid less when account is taken of their responsibilities. A reminder that staff face a security risk on a daily basis was seen yesterday when three criminals armed with hammers carried out an attempted raid on a post office in Clontarf.

Fortunately, no money was taken during the failed heist but a male employee received an injury to his hand and was taken to hospital.

Postal workers have been the target of so-called “tiger kidnapping” during which family members were held hostage while a key-holder was forced to hand over cash from a post office safe.

Postmasters have reason to be angry but it would be counter-productive to boycott passport express and money transfer services or withdraw co-operation from a new financial services package through An Post’s joint venture with Belgian bank Fortis.

While more than 1,000 of its 1,300 outlets are computerised, An Post sees no evidence that automation by itself generates enough business to keep post offices open.

There can be no denying the postal service is in crisis. As the Government whips up the election campaign, the gauntlet has been thrown down by the IPU.

If the political parties are serious about keeping the network alive, rural post offices must be kept open. Otherwise, TDs may pay a high price at the polls, particularly in constituencies where people have campaigned to keep their post office open and where every vote will count.