I thank you for giving me the opportunity to raise this very important matter. It seems to be a feature of Dáil life nowadays to have to seek Adjournment Debates on inefficiencies in many Government Departments. We have had Social Welfare during the past few weeks and it is still going on. We have had to seek additional information in regard to PAYE, birth certificates and so on.
Recently I asked the Minister for the Public Service about the number of civil servants and I was told there are 30,000 more than there were ten years ago. Yet it seems that every service in direct contact with and supposed to be of service to the public is much worse than it ever has been. This applies particularly to the Dublin city and county postal service.
It has been the experience of all my colleagues throughout the city and county — Deputy Quinn endorsed that earlier, and I am sure that if the Minister consults his Deputies in the two areas they will tell him the same thing — that frequently it takes five days to have a letter delivered, and sometimes longer. The usual delivery time is three days.
I want to know what has happened. When I was a young fellow in Dublin we were all poor. In pre-computer days we could post a letter before 11 a.m. and it would be delivered that evening. We had three deliveries per day. We are now lucky to have one and luckier still if the post is delivered at all. The Minister can "tut-tut" all he likes, but this is a major problem. I asked him at Question Time to check to see if there is any merit in what I had been saying. He refused, saying there was not any need to check. Deputies are not putting down questions for nothing on matters that do not need checking.
There is a serious problem in the Dublin city and county postal service — I do not know what the position is in the rest of the country. As I told the Minister earlier, I resorted to a checking system: I sent myself a letter with a batch I was sending out from my office. I have frequent complaints from my constituents that they had not got letters even though I might have written to them sometimes nine days earlier. Many of my Christmas cards, which I posted a week before Christmas, did not arrive until 9 January. If the Minister likes I will bring these letters to him.
All I want to achieve is to get it into the Minister's head that there is a major problem so that he will not be coming in here telling us there is not. It seems to me that this is a part of a bigger jigsaw, a general breakdown in the public service. As the Minister tried to impute to me at Question Time, I do not blame the staff in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, either postal or administrative, any more than I blame the staff in the Department of Social Welfare or the Department of Health where there are queues for birth certificates. I know the staff are doing their best. The complaint is against the management, and the Government are the management and they are making a total mess of it.
I am asking the Minister to check with other Deputies and with business concerns in the city. I had an appointment today at 2.30 with two Dublin businessmen. Deputy Kelly, who had put down the question could not be here and he asked me to come in on it. When I went to meet them I apologised for my delay and explained why I was late, and they told me — one of them is a Fianna Fáil cumann member in Dublin South Central——