An Post is inefficient and needs an overhaul
Meantime An Post's professed desire to implement best practice is laughable in light of its failures to achieve even 75% next-day mail delivery. The reality is that An Post is grossly inefficient but autocratically declines dialogue with those affected by its unsustainable decisions.
The postal delivery service is loss-making primarily because of the massive losses An Post incurs for having failed properly to estimate the cost of delivering mail coming into the country. An Post can't renegotiate the Rheims agreement and its Irish customers apparently must pay either through increased charges or loss of services in towns and villages.
An Post needs also fully to disclose to the paying public its individual losses (or profits?) in the operation of its many sub-companies.
Listening to the company, the closure of 50 post offices is the panacea for all its ills. If it closed all 98 company offices it would achieve 800 redundancies but why close any when, apparently, its counter service is profitable?
It is extraordinary that in the same year that An Post made provision for a E53m redundancy charge, it increased its head office staff by 10%. It is amazing also that it spent over E100m from the sale of Ireland Online on automated mail sorting centres while also increasing its mail sorting staff by 200, saying simultaneously that mail volume had fallen.
In seeking to redress its losses An Post has effectively investigated itself. There has been no rigorous independent financial assessment of An Post on our behalf despite the fact that we have paid its way since the foundation of the state.
Unless it is radically overhauled, An Post will be incapable of delivering on its obligations to the public at reasonable cost in financial, social and economic terms.
Phil O'Regan,
Shannon Villa,
Tawnies Upper,
Clonakilty,
Co Cork.
