THE LAST STRAW: Long before this week's controversy over the stamp with the map of Europe, I sensed a cavalier attitude to geography from An Post, at least in the GPO, writes Frank McNally
Every time I send a letter, for example, I'm presented with a choice between a postbox marked "Dublin" and one marked "All Other Places". I'm sure many of the people who work at An Post's headquarters are Dubliners, and justifiably proud of it. But that's no excuse for such a narrow world-view. You wouldn't get that even in Cork.
The apparent mix-up of Crete and Cyprus on the 65-cent stamp has merely confirmed my suspicions. Cyprus is probably the only country in the world to take the trouble of putting its map on the national flag: a plea for attention, clearly. So An Post's stamp is an insult to a people already sensitive about their identity. The consequences could be far-reaching. Imagine you've just sent a very important business document to an easily-offended Cypriot contact and - unnoticed by you - it's carrying the biggest postal insult since the Ems telegram. Your only consolation is that, with An Post's sense of geography, it'll never reach Cyprus anyway.
The stamp won't do much for the Irish public's confidence in the mail system either. If the company can't distinguish between two islands separated by 300 miles of the Mediterranean, what chance is there for the thousands of people who live in small, identical, red-brick houses? Bad enough if the house in is Dublin, but if it's in All Other Places, you'd better stick with e-mail.
In fairness, it should be noted that An Post has denied any mistake.
"What appears to be Crete is in fact Cyprus," a spokesman told The Irish Times, explaining that the European map had been "tweaked". And OK, for reasons of perspective, Cyprus probably had to be repositioned somewhere between southern Greece and Éire (the word, not the country). But even accepting this arrangement, it's hard to see why the relocated Cyprus had to take the shape of Crete as well. There's tweaking and there's tweaking.
Yes, the UN peace plan for Cyprus fell flat, but that surely doesn't justify giving the country the contours of a hedgehog run over by a truck (apologies to readers in Crete). An Post's explanation is that the area of the map occupied by the hybrid state is so small as to be "barely noticeable". Yet Spain's Mediterranean islands are even smaller, and An Post - let's give credit where it's due - managed to make made a complete Balearics of them.
One other possible explanation is that the company pre-empted the Greek-Cypriot rejection of the peace plan and excluded the Turkish area from the EU, a move that would radically alter the shape of the country. But the truth is that the thing on the map looks as much like Turkish Cyprus as Greek Cyprus, and it looks more like the UN-policed buffer zone than either of them. Anyway, if An Post's political advisers had that much foresight, maybe the UN should hand over the peace plan, and get them to tweak that as well.
The incident does at least highlight the many challenges posed by the new Europe. The countries of Slovakia and Slovenia, for example, are a postal mix-up waiting to happen. Not only do they sound like they're joined at the hip, but they have almost identical flags, with no helpful maps on either. If you're sending a letter to Slovenia any time soon, it might be as well to include directions in brackets under the address (for example: "Just after Italy, first country on right").
An Post is no stranger to diplomatic incidents. In 2001, at the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis in Britain, the company sold thousands of St Patrick's Day cards - many of them bound for the UK - featuring a sheep the colour of mint sauce and the slogan: "The grass is greener on my side." I know the card was unlikely to be read by any British sheep, but it was still insensitive. In any case, the joke backfired when a foot-and-mouth case was confirmed here, in Co Louth. If you saw any green sheep on the Cooley Mountains in 2001, they'd probably camouflaged themselves to avoid assassination by the Army.
We must hope that the Cypriots will not be upset by the faux-pas. Otherwise it might sour relations between Dublin and Nicosia, and perhaps even prevent final agreement on the EU constitutional treaty. The said document has yet to be named, incidentally, and since it will be concluded in Brussels, its name could be a diplomatic challenge. But if anyone's listening, my suggestion is "The Treaty of Dublin" ("and All Other Places").