AN POST “can and will thrive as a publicly owned institution”, according to Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan.
Opening a new An Post museum in the GPO that traces the history of the postal system as part of the history of the State, Mr Ryan also said that with new EU directives: “We’re going to have to . . . open up our postal system to more competition. I think that’s very healthy.”
He also believed moving the Abbey Theatre into the GPO would be a “very good development”. And “if that does happen and we can get the funding for it, we should also keep it as a post office”. He described the GPO as “our best building. It’s right in the heart of the city.”
The Minister told some 60 people at the launch of the new museum last night, including British ambassador Julian King, that “we are confident now as a people in the public service as well as the private sector that competition is actually good”.
“I don’t think there’s a private sector good/public sector bad ethos in this country. I don’t think it’s the reality of how we work. We work well and badly in equal measure across a whole range of companies and different circumstances depending on how good our management is and in An Post we have a very good management.”
He praised the interactive museum which will be a permanent feature in the GPO. “It’s our history set out,” he said. “This building is of huge importance to us. As a post office it’s a celebration for us as ordinary everyday working people.”
Letters, Lives and Libertyis the theme of the museum. It has a €2 admission charge and gives a general history of the postal service from the 1600s. It includes displays of three separate stamp collections, including every Irish stamp, the Leinster collection gifted by the Duke of Leinster and the Berne collection.
The high-tech exhibition includes options for visitors to design their own stamps and have them e-mailed to them, along with reproductions of a train postal sorting carriage, a blunderbuss gun used for security, a telephone exchange with recordings of phone conversations and displays of bicycles and uniforms from down the decades.
An 11-minute film depicting scenes from the 1916 Rising and what staff at the post office might have witnessed is a highlight of the exhibition, which also includes Ireland’s oldest post box.
An Post chief executive Donal Connell said the building was “one of the world’s oldest continuously functioning GPOs”.
Outlining some of the postal service’s history, he said that in 1657 Oliver Cromwell turned it into a State monopoly. The penny black stamp was printed in Dublin 1773 and in 1831 the postal service returned control from London because of “financial management” difficulties.
An Post chairman John FitzGerald said the exhibition was very timely ahead of the centenary of the 1916 Rising. He pointed out that some 85 per cent of visitors to Ireland visited the historical trail around Dublin.
He said that while An Post was a viable business and one of the biggest employers in the State “we are also the custodians of an important heritage, not just for the city but for the nation”.
