asked the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs if he will consider the installation of a public telephone at Knockraha Post Office, County Cork, as one is urgently required in the area.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Provision of Telephone Facilities.
It is the intention of the Department to install a telephone in every post office. As there are still about 700 post offices to be dealt with —most of them in remote areas—the work will have to be spread over a number of years. So that the best progress may be made, the order in which call offices are installed is determined mainly on engineering considerations.
Knockraha is not one of the call offices included in the programme for the coming year which was announced in reply to a question put yesterday by Deputy Spring. It is not, I regret, possible to say when a call office will be provided there.
Is that answer any different from an answer to a question of a similar nature yesterday?
If Deputies insist on putting down the one question, obviously they have to get the one answer. Yesterday, in reply to a question put by Deputy Spring, who asked what was the programme of new call office installations in County Kerry, I gave a list of the call offices which would be erected in the next 12 months. I did that, hoping that Deputies would take note of the programme and if they did not see an office on the list in which they were interested, they would realise that it would not be provided in the next year. I had also hoped that they would bear that in mind and that they would not continue to ask questions about offices which they knew would not be undertaken within the last 12 months.
What a hope!
asked the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs whether he will consider the provision of a second trunk line to Castlelyons Post Office, Fermoy, as there is considerable delay in obtaining telephone calls to outside areas at present.
The delay to calls from Castlelyons is due to insufficiency of trunk lines between Fermoy and Rathcormac (with which Castlelyons is connected) and between Fermoy and Cork. It is hoped to provide additional lines on both routes within the next few months.