Post Office Closures: Statements
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-04
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Thomas Gould (SF), Cork North-Central

In 2022 there was an announcement that Blarney post office was going to close but following a campaign by the local people in Blarney and meetings organised by myself and people in Sinn Féin, a man named Daniel came forward and he saved the post office and turned it around. I want to recognise the unbelievable work he and his staff have done and the people of Blarney. However, in 2018 the post office in Shandon Street, not 100 yd from my office, closed down. Promised were made that they would save Shandon Street post office. The building in the heart of Shandon Street in the heart of Cork city is derelict now. In Blackpool, another post office was closed. It was a miracle it was reopened but in the shopping centre. For villages and communities like Blackpool this is death by a thousand cuts.
We see buildings being left idle and communities left abandoned. Some of my colleagues spoke about the 257 post offices which closed in the past ten years but 34 were in Cork alone, the biggest number in any county, with 22 rural and 12 urban post offices. The Ministers came in here to tell us what they are doing. They slashed the post offices in Cork. The people in communities, both urban and rural, are feeling it. This Government, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the Healy-Rae Independents and the Lowry Independents are backing the destruction of the post offices in this State.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-03-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:43+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-04