The post office, a key traditional institution in Irish villages, can keep its commercial and social relevance
MY MOTHER retired this week after 50 years of running the local post office in a village in south Co Wexford. She has been a postmistress longer than Ian Paisley has been in politics, having established Ballycullane post office with my dad in January 1958. In an interview with a local newspaper this week she reflected on the changes over the last five decades.
Inside the post office the dominant aromas were once those of sackcloth mailbags and sealing wax. Now most parcels and letters are sent in self-sealing cartons. Licking stamps was once the most distasteful part of the job but stamps now come adhesive-backed.
The thud of the office date stamp on letters and social welfare payment books is one of the abiding memories of my youth but, thanks to bar codes and new franking technology, the date stamp has fallen silent.
The daily and weekly reconciliation of the post office accounts was the most stressful part of my mum's working life, particularly in the days when they were done by long hand in hard copy journals. Now Ballycullane, like most post offices, is completely automated.
Other consequences of modernity are the large glass-and-steel barrier on top of the counter and the time-delay safe, all designed to guard against the trend of sub-post office robberies. Ballycullane post office itself was robbed in 1986. Thankfully, it occurred in the middle of the night when we were all asleep. A gang forced the iron bars of the front windows and pulled the modest post office safe from its perch under the counter, brought it up the road to a local building site, prised it open and made off with the contents.
The early and mid-1980s were dark times in country villages, with Saturday bringing a depressing queue of social welfare recipients to the post office, most of them unemployed men and some women who couldn't emigrate because they were married with young families. The economic turnaround of the late 1980s and early 1990s brought a dramatic and welcome fall-off in this aspect of the post office's business.
Like many post offices we also had a small grocery shop on the premises with a butcher counter on Fridays and children's allowance days. The shop is long closed because supermarkets in the towns and even in one or two of the neighbouring villages have rendered small local shops unprofitable.
For all the technological advances, one central feature remained unchanged. The post office has always been at the heart of community life. It was the first port of call for travellers looking for directions, even for Americans looking for ancestors. More importantly, it was the first refuge of many people looking not only for stamps but for company. Each Thursday and Friday hundreds from the village and surrounding townlands came to collect their pensions and for some it was one of their few weekly outings. It provided a plethora of other local services including school keyholder or information officer for local newspapers checking match results, for those confirming a funeral arrangement or which of the doctors was on call.
While there has been a surge again in the population of rural villages, there is a lot less social infrastructure than in past decades. The age profile of the church's manpower is rising rapidly and some parochial houses have been boarded up. Many rural Garda stations have closed or become non-residential. Rural shops face competition from a second wave of even larger and cheaper supermarkets. Local pubs are closing at a striking rate. In those circumstances there is still much about local post offices that needs to be preserved.
The post office network and the men and women who staff it, whether as An Post employees or as sub-contractors, are not looking for a free lunch. They have proved incredibly adaptable to competition and the threat posed by the changing pattern in social welfare payments. The range of services has grown exponentially. You can order your passport, develop photographs, avail of a full range of banking facilities and even purchase gift vouchers for Dublin department stores at your local office. The rural post office network should be preserved not for its own sake on an unprofitable basis but because much more could be delivered, and delivered well, through local post offices. Developing them as community citizen information centres should go hand in hand with further expansion of their commercial services.
As for my mum, she's looking forward to her retirement. My dad worries that she'll be at home under his feet. She says there's no chance of that with her travel plans. Having been tied to a counter and to the service of a community for five decades, there is much of this country and indeed of other countries that she wants to see.