When Fintan O'Toole lived in New York in the late 1990s, his office was on 33rd Street.
My walk to work every day would take me up Eighth Avenue, past Penn Station. While waiting for the lights to change, I would look across at McKim, Mead & White's General Post Office building and the grandiloquent inscription, translated from the Greek of Herodotus that ran across the front: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
It always made me smile, partly at the contrast between its heroic sentiments and the bleary-eyed postal workers shuffling into the dingy warehouse behind the elegant façade. But partly also in recognition of the real pride that this public service once evoked from those who worked in it and those who used it.
It is not accidental that postal buildings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries like the GPOs in New York or Dublin were conceived as grand public spaces to be decked out with neo-classical columns, high windows and symbolic sculpture. Patrick Pearse and his comrades knew what they were doing when they decided to occupy the GPO. The postal service is one of the great achievements of the nation state, a practical and symbolic embodiment of the notion that citizens, wherever they lived, formed part of a community of communication.
Cheap, efficient, and offering extraordinary value for money, national postal services also expressed a collective identity by allowing the old lady in Dingle to write to her Dublin son for the same price the Grafton Street businessman paid to send a letter to Henry Street.
Behind the current postal dispute is the gradual destruction of this ideal. Whatever its details, the row is the product of a management under pressure to make An Post a successful commercial business by squeezing costs. While no-one could object to making any public service more efficient, we really should think hard about this whole notion that An Post must be first and foremost a viable business.
There is a set of assumptions that comes with a pure business model, and it doesn't have room for old-fashioned values like the rural postman whose visit may be an elderly person's only contact of the day, or the great democratic value of equal access to common services.
This isn't just an abstract worry. We already have a very clear example of what the push towards privatisation means. For most Irish families, the parcel from America has long had a particular place in life. For generations, Uncle Paddy and Auntie Maureen in Boston sent their gifts to Lifford or Listowel.
They sealed the box with Sellotape, took it down to the post office and paid for the stamps. It arrived in Ireland, and the local postman delivered it up the mucky boreen. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor potholes nor cowpats stayed that courier from the swift completion of his appointed round.
Then, late in 2002, the United States Postal Service signed an agreement with Consignia, the commercialised British postal company, to deliver air-mail packages from the US to 23 countries in Europe. They, in turn, use a private company, GLS to handle the delivery of these packages in Ireland. The result can be gauged on any of the emigrant websites.
Here's a typical complaint from the Carroll family in Texas: "Two parcels of gifts, each valued at slightly over $100 (each) and sent by the US Postal Service, airmail, to both Co Waterford and Co Limerick - were held in Dublin by this private delivery service. The addresses, in each case, were contacted from Dublin and asked to pay exorbitant delivery charges - for more than half the value of the parcels - with little or no explanation. In each case, the Irish relatives managed to bargain down the charges somewhat.
"Subsequently, parcels were not guaranteed safe delivery - or notification of where such parcels could be picked up safely! In the one instance in Co Waterford, the parcel was dropped through an open window in the addressee's home!"
This is what you get with the magical efficiency of privatisation: new layers of bureaucracy bringing new delays, enormously increased charges and an end to the personal service of the local postal worker.
And it's not just private customers who suffer. In Northern Ireland, for example, the Federation of Small Businesses has been dismayed by cutbacks in the name of efficiency which have involved the closure of three of the Royal Mail's four parcel post depots. Competition in high-volume urban areas may well bring savings, but largely at the expense of businesses in rural areas and small towns.
The experience of privatised services on this island so far should serve as a reminder that a public postal service is worth fighting for. It is one of the most civilised and civilising legacies of the last 150 years. It has also given all of us access at an incredibly cheap price to a service that used to be the preserve of the wealthy. The current dispute gives us an opportunity to appreciate something we have taken for granted and to value an expression of common values that is in danger of getting lost in the post.