I wish to use the opportunity afforded to me to make a reasonably forceful protest at the marked deterioration in the postal services between the Republic of Ireland and the mainland of the United Kingdom over the past three to six months. I want to exclude from my remarks postal services to Northern Ireland because there are special difficulties there which we all know about and we can well appreciate the delays that take place in postal services to Northern Ireland. In general terms they have not deteriorated, considering the difficult situation, nearly as much as one might have expected.
During the past three to six months there has been a very marked deterioration in postal services between here and the rest of the United Kingdom. Letter post is particularly badly affected and there is a lengthening of about two days in the time it takes a letter to get from here to England. For example, whereas a year ago it would have taken two or three days and one could have been fairly sure of delivery in two or three days, posting here and arriving in England, now it is taking five to six days and this is a fairly consistent length of time.
Without the technical information which the Minister should have at his disposal it is not easy for me to say where the fault lies. There is a fault, and what I am asking is that the Minister would put his finger on this fault and eradicate it. It became clear to everybody over the last quarter or so, during the period of the telephone strike, that we cannot now rely on telephones. But the post between here and England has got so unreliable that, if you post a letter, to make sure the message gets through within a week you have to make a phone call as well. That is a ridiculous situation and I want the Minister to do something about it. It may not all lie within his bailiwick.
I remember well that when I was a student in Cambridge between 1960 and 1963 I used to get regular letters from my home in East Cork from a small sub post office and they took about four days. That was because they came from a small sub post office in the country and not a main collecting area. These letters took four days and it was a fairly consistent pattern. During that period of time there was a go-slow in the British postal service that lasted for three to four months. My letters from East Cork to Cambridge all started arriving consistently a day or two earlier than normal during the go-slow.
This was an interesting phenomenon and was worth investigating. Of course. I found on a little investigation that what had happened was that the post from the Republic during the go-slow was being diverted away from the main sorting office in Mountpleasant in London and was passing through a smaller sorting office in Birmingham, and though the Birmingham postmen were on a go-slow like the London people the post arrived a day or sometimes two days earlier.
It could well be that the fault lies partially in the United Kingdom. In that case it is up to the Minister to do a thorough investigation of this and to apply pressure on his opposite number in the UK. I am certain that if the reverse situation happened and if there was a serious delay here the UK Minister for Posts and Telegraphs would be delighted to apply pressure on our services here. so I ask the Minister to find out where the fault lies.
My guess is that it is partly the fault of our own postal service and partly the fault of our friends across the water. The Minister should get together with his opposite number to eradicate these quite unnecessary delays. It is ridiculous that letters going from here to London should take an average of five to six days. That is the sort of mean delivery time that I seem to be getting. A lot of my constituents have raised this problem with me. People in business find that it is not enough to write a letter to London, to the south of England or to any part of Britain: you have got to make a telephone call as well.
Some years ago it would have been more difficult to make this case. That was at the time in which there was a spate of letter bombs being sent, regrettably some of them from Irish addresses. I think most from north of the Border, to well known people in Britain. At that time one just could not blame the British authorities for treating the Irish post with considerably more care than it was usually treated. In fact, I think they just took in the post and let it lie around for a few days to see if anything happened. Of course it was checked and sorted much more carefully and, no doubt, lots more of the packages were opened by the postal service. Some of them probably were dipped in buckets of water if they looked suspicious. Those days now, happily, are gone.
There seems to be no reason whatever for hold-ups. I think that in the circumstances the Minister should investigate his own service. There was some time ago a story during the telephone strike of delays in our Sheriff Street sorting office. I hope that those problems have been sorted out.
The Minister should, first of all, look at his own service and make sure that it is running at its maximum efficiency and then, if the fault is not seen to lie there or only partially to lie there, when something is being done about that situation, then he can say to his opposite number in the UK: "Look, our post is suffering undue delay, the delay is not coming from procedures on our side of the Irish Sea. Will you please get your situation sorted out and ensure that letters coming from this country to Britain or vice versa are not suffering undue delays up to a period of one to sometimes three days?”
