Madam, – Anna McHugh’s contention, as Head of Corporate Communications, GPO (December 4th) that this year’s selection of Christmas stamps provides “real choice” for customers seems as disingenuous as it is misleading.
On a visit to one suburban Post Office, I found the walls garishly plastered with pictures of what Ms McHugh calls a festive robin by way of advertising for Christmas stamps. At no point of this vulgar display was there any mention of an alternative to the secular and absurd robin.
Ms McHugh describes other stamps – denoting the Nativity and the Annunciation as “magnificent”. They are so magnificent that the Post Office has hidden them. They have not mentioned them until they were forced to do so by letters to The Irish Times.
They were religious and therefore were something unspoken. The red-chested robin rules the roost. Ask for the religious stamps at a Post Office near you and watch the jaw drop, as though you had asked for a cooked chicken.
It is quite clear that a marketing decision was made. A decision that had to be explicit and socially formative. We will sell the agnostic robin and we will conceal as far as possible the very existence of the numinous.
The religious paintings are themselves diffident and beautiful. A far cry from the Irish vulgar ornithology. But each stamp is affixed to a relatively huge addendum – “Éire €0.55”. They will be a collector’s piece for frank and confident awfulness. The printed price shoves away the tender beauty of the Blessed Virgin’s acceptance. The Post Office marketeers could never, ever, ignore the real world could they? And as a triumphalist endorsement of the robin stamps, the Post Office has made them cheaper, cheaper in every sense, than those which reflect the solemnity of the Incarnation. Ms McHugh says it is all due to new technology. – Yours, etc,