AN POST is to carry out a £5.6 million rural post office development programme involving the refurbishing and modernising of a further 400 post offices throughout the State.
Announcing the programme yesterday, the Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications, Mr Lowry, said the work would be carried out with the support of the European Regional Development Fund (£1.6 million). Each post office will be computerised and the staff will receive customer service and computer skills training.
The offices, located in every county, will have an expanded range of services, and the development programme is aimed at making the post office network operate like customer driven retail outlets.
The services available will include billpay, savings and investments, passport express, national lottery, social welfare payments and bureau de change. The new programme expects to have the 400 post offices modernised by December 1997. An Post will then have 1,000 modernised post offices.
Mr Lowry said the company was not turning its back on rural Ireland. "An Post is not a city postal service. It is a national postal service and it must continue to hold and express a commitment to the real and emerging needs of rural Ireland."
He said the company had invested £40 million in computerising 600 of its busiest post offices. It had written its own software and, as part of the Pathway Group, had won a contract to computerise 20,000 post offices throughout the UK.
The Minister added that the commitment to customer services "must be rediscovered, reinvented and refocused".