It was increasingly obvious that rural communities would not survive unless ways could be found to maintain and increase the levels of services being provided in rural areas, the Irish Rural Link (IRL) conference in Cavan was told yesterday.
Séamus Boland, chairman of the IRL, a national group campaigning for sustainable rural communities, said it was frustrating to realise that solutions to the problems of access to services in rural areas had been found elsewhere in Europe.
"We in Ireland do not need to reinvent the wheel on this, but we do need political will and an acceptance by policy-makers that solutions can be found if we are willing to learn from other countries and adapt our service-delivery models," he said.
The conference was told by Pat McCann, of the Irish Postmasters' Union, that the post office network was under serious threat and could collapse because of falling volumes of social welfare transactions.
"The Department of Social and Family Affairs is pursuing an agenda that will see more and more social welfare recipients having to access their payments at a bank rather than at a post office," he said, adding that social welfare was the post office's single biggest customer.
Mr McCann told delegates that 400 post offices had closed since 2002. He said it was being predicted that another 400 smaller sub-post offices could be closed this year.
Mr McCann said the reality had to be faced that post offices were also under threat from modern technology and from changing lifestyles. As a result of increasing pressure on time many more younger people were now doing much of their business online. The profile and density of the population which now had bank accounts was vastly different from what it had been even 25 years ago and the current value of child benefit and similar entitlements encouraged many young mothers to have this money paid directly into a bank account.
"These are the kinds of developments that threaten the future of the local post office and the local shop," Mr McCann added.
Nobody in IRL wanted to thwart consumer choice or what was seen as progress, he said, but society needed to consider what importance it attached to the retention of the local community concept and what infrastructure was needed by those living in rural areas.
On the issue of rural transport, Erin Cotter, national co-ordinator of the Rural Transport Programme, Pobal, told the conference that the scheme, which is community-based in 34 locations, had arranged 2.26 million passenger journeys since 2001.
She said that a breakdown of the categories of people using the service showed that 67 per cent were female and 61 per cent had free travel passes, although only half had ever used them. The survey also showed that 70 per cent of the rural people who availed of the scheme did not have any access to a car.
An interesting finding, she said, was that one-third of the 200 operators involved in the scheme had updated their vehicles, while some community groups had increased the numbers of vehicles they were using.