Posted online: Jan 25th, 2008

The impact of post office closures on elderly and isolated people in counties like Kildare has been slammed by the St Vincent de Paul and Age Action Ireland.

Since the start of this year, 17 post offices have closed in Ireland, and in the past seven years 344 post offices have closed.    

And Newbridge’s Eamonn Timmins of Age Action Ireland added his voice to the criticism of An Post: “Post offices are a lifeline for a lot of older people and it is actually more difficult now to get your pension than it was twenty or thirty years ago.”

Although no figures are available for County Kildare, several smaller offices in outlaying areas have closed in the past 12 months, with their business being transferred to the larger towns like Athy in the south, and Newbridge and Naas in the north.

“The latest closure was in Laytown, Co Meath – so they are building houses all over the place and then the people have no post office,” said Stuart Kenny of St Vincent de Paul.

Both organisations have called on the government to intervene and halt the progress of the postal system’s decline.
“We accept that the company has a commercial mandate but so does Bus Eireann and the ESB and they provide services for areas that are not commercially viable. We think it’s time the government stepped in. The offices are slipping away from us – we have lost 40-41pc of the contractor-operated offices,” Mr Kenny told the Post.
Eamonn Timmins pointed out that, while there is a rural transport service operating in some areas, this isn’t the perfect solution either. “I know of one case of a woman in Milltown in Kildare, who has to pay a taxi €7 just to get to the bus stop,” he told the Post.

“We are trying to discourage older people from hoarding money in their homes but now the government is working against this. People who have further to travel to collect their pensions often wait for a week or two or three, so they end up having to hoard their money at home then,” he pointed out.
And he added that the government and An Post needed to exercise some ‘flexible thinking’ which might also limit the loss of the ‘social’ aspect of visiting the post office. In the Scottish Highlands, the local postman drives a mini-bus, thus also offering a rural transport service. Age Action Ireland is suggesting a ‘voucher’ system may be operated, for use on a local bus service. This service could possibly be operated by school bus drivers during the ‘slack’ mid-morning period, he suggested.

“We’re saying clearly to An Post and to the government that where the closure of a post office is deemed commercially justifiable, it is vital that alternatives are provided,” added Stuart Kenny.