The final weeks of the political off-season are being devoted to that old favourite: the rural post office network. At peak, there were 1,600 An Post outlets in Ireland, a figure which has now fallen to about 1,200. Should the company’s latest closure plan go through, there will be about 1,000. Since there are 26 counties, the figure of 1,000 equates to 40 post offices per county. Irish counties, with a few exceptions, are not very big: Cork, Donegal and Mayo need more post offices than Carlow, but an average of 40 per county is a lot.

The company has promised that once the new plan goes through, any village with a population of 500 or more will still have a post office and hardly anybody will live more than 10 or 15 minutes from the nearest outlet.

The issue has departed the realm of the practical and has become entirely symbolic. Many people (many TDs, at any rate) are concerned about the ‘‘decline of rural Ireland’’ and regard the closure of any additional post offices as evidence of the Government’s intention to abolish the rural way of life for once and for all.

But post offices have been closed in Dublin and in other cities, as have banks, department stores and even garda stations. Empty retail premises adorn the towns and villages but also the secondary streets of every urban area in Ireland. Retailing internationally is in turmoil: several of the UK’s biggest chains, including BHS and Poundworld, have gone out of business: 11,000 lost their jobs in BHS alone. Lloyds Pharmacy, Debenhams, Homebase, House of Fraser, Mothercare and several others are facing administration or have announced extensive closures.

In Ireland, many retailers have been trimming the scale of their distribution networks for decades. Both of the major banks are now operating national networks a lot smaller than the post office system. Bank of Ireland has about 250 branches and is expected to close a large number, perhaps as many as 100, over the next few years. AIB is already down to 200 and Ulster Bank has closed dozens since the crash.

Grocery chains

The big grocery chains cover the country with far fewer branches than the post office. Lidl, for example, although still in expansion mode, has a store accessible to most of the population with a total of just 140 outlets.

The ATM machine, once seen as a threat to bank branches, is beginning to suffer from cashless transactions. ATMs are being withdrawn across Europe and many retailers no longer want them in their shops because of cost. Their customers increasingly use swipe cards and the shopkeepers are happy to see the decline in the use of cash. The younger generation, and increasing numbers of the not-so-young, do their banking over the internet, or on smartphones, and utilisation of the ATMs is declining rapidly.

In this environment, there is no rational case for maintaining the current enormous network of rural post offices. It bears endless repetition that, voluble TDs notwithstanding, most parts of rural Ireland are not in decline. Urban populations are rising but rural populations, in almost all counties, are rising too. The rationalisation of retailing is happening everywhere, including in the cities, and has nothing to do with some dastardly campaign of Government neglect. It is also happening all over Europe, not just in Ireland, and the reasons are the same everywhere: people have cars and are happy to travel to the nearest town to shop and they do business online.

Almost half of the post office outlets have an annual turnover of less than €50,000. Some no longer sell any worthwhile volume of postage stamps, since most people no longer write letters.

Business, as well as personal communication, is migrating to email and the letters business may not survive. My personal incoming mail now consists almost entirely of missives, quite unnecessary, from banks and utility companies, informing me that my bill has already been paid by standing order. They are all seeking to switch to email and it puzzles me that they took so long.

There is one bright spot – the parcels business has grown because of online shopping but An Post has competition in this segment and parcels traffic cannot sustain the enormous network of offices on its own.

The plan of rationalisation announced by the company is designed to withdraw service gradually in the areas of lowest demand and An Post is clearly sensitive to the political complaints that have ensued.

But one has to wonder how many people are really discommoded if their next trip to the post office must coincide with their next shopping journey to the nearest town, or their next trip to the bank? How much of the political reaction is real and how much is manufactured outrage?