Sir - On October 18 in, 1994, the course of a speech to the members of Dail Eireann, Mr Brian Cowen TD, Minister for Transport Energy and Communications said: "As part of its plans to improve services to its customers An Post, in co operation with the Department of Social and the National Treasury Management Agency, has formulated plans to provide computerised services linked by a telecommunications network to 1,200 post offices nationwide". He went to great lengths to explain how this computerisation would come about.
However, An Post seems to have plans to computerise 1,000 offices and says that it will then look at the "technological requirements" of the remainder of the country's post offices (approximately 900 more). Prior to the Minister's speech and since then An Post, and indeed the Minister for Transport Energy and Communications, have not mentioned a figure of 1,200 computerised offices in any of their public announcements.
Sixty members of Dail Eireann voted for the Minister's amendment to the Rural Post Offices private members bill on the basis of the Minister's speech. Were these members of our legislature being misled or, worse still, deliberately being misled?
Inca letter to the undersigned, dated March 14th, 1995, Mr Brian Cowen TD, stated: "Any statements that were made in the house are made by me in good faith on the basis of information compiled by public servants whose integrity I don't doubt". Who are these public servants?
An Post is closing small rural post offices all over the country, from the border counties' right through to the tip of Kerry. We maintain that it is implementing the 1991 Viability Plan (whereby it would close 550 post offices nationwide) by stealth, despite its denials of same. This Viability Plan was officially shelved by Minister Seamus Brennan TD after a huge public outcry.
In an interview with the then Business Editor of the Irish Independent, Mr Malt Cooper, as reported on April 25th, 1996, Mr Hynes, CEO of An Post, stated: "We have been given a monopoly, so we can fund a rural postal delivery service. It costs far more to subsidise this than our rural sub post offices. But we are not too fussed about that. Every business has some tough part to run." He said he did not find support in the customer base for the plan to close many of the "uneconomic" rural sub post offices. "That's what the people want and what the Government has told us, so we'll work within that policy network."
Have our TDs and indeed our Ministers any pride in themselves when they allow Government Agencies to remove vital national services from remote rural areas without a hint of consideration for the hardship they are causing to hardpressed rural dwellers? EU policy is "to preserve and conserve our small rural communities" and it is shameless to think that our Government agencies - in the pursuit of profits - can ignore these policies. Indeed a handful of civil servants seem to have achieved in a couple of decades what "our oppressors" failed to achieve over centuries - the depopulation of rural Ireland. Unless something concrete and fast is done by our politicians to stop this continuous onslaught on our rural institutions by power hungry "public servants" our days as a democracy could be very nearly over. - Yours etc.,
PRO CORPO
(Conserve Our Rural Post
Offices),
Mallow,
Co Cork.