People living in a small town in west Cork's Beara peninsula will have to make a 20-mile round journey to post a package from today due to the closure of Adrigole post office.
Residents will have to travel to Castletownbere or Glengarriff for postal services as the sub-post office ceased business yesterday.
Agreement on the shutdown was reached between An Post and operators of the sub-post office. However, Fine Gael councillor Mr Noel Harrington claims An Post is making it economically impossible for private operators to run sub-post offices. He cites lack of investment and upgrading of existing post offices as the primary problem.
He has also accused the Government of "systematically shutting down" smaller rural towns.
"Closing the post office here is another link in the chain. The Garda station is gone. Now there is no post office. Towns like Adrigole just aren't going to survive.
"The post office is a massive loss to the people who use it for pensions and so on. They may say it is more convenient to use banks for certain services but Adrigole doesn't even have a bank."
He said the closure of the Adrigole office would impact on elderly people in particular. "On Friday morning they meet the same people picking up their pensions. For some people this is the only social contact they have."