Postman Tom Gethings brings more than the post on his daily round. He provides a link to the outside world for isolated, sometimes lonely people. Kathy Sheridan accompanies him on his round.
There is what country people call a "thin wind" on Ballinabrockey. That's the kind that pierces your bones, numbs your lips and reminds you to make a will. Ahead of us, Lugnaquilla looms out of soft grey cloud. Sorrell Hill, snow-capped and lit by the morning sun, resembles a Christmas pudding. Old snow crackles underfoot in the scattered gateways and the little frost-sparkled roads that curve and rise above the Liffey Valley, heading out of Manor Kilbride towards the Sally Gap, are perfect for pictures and skating practice.
Not yet 7.45 a.m. on Thursday morning and this reporter has already buried her car deep in a north Kildare ditch following a graceful pirouette on an ungritted by-road. But while the countryside shivers, skids, swears and casts around for someone to sue, postman Tom Gethings serenely maintains his routine.
In his three-year-old Renault Kangoo van, with 85,000 on the clock and sprig of holly on the dashboard, he has left his Baltinglass home as usual at 5.30 a.m., to reach the Naas sorting office by 6.15 a.m.. By 8.30 a.m., he is back in Manor Kilbride, ready for a journey that will take him up to Kippure to where the snow grows heavier as the road rises and becomes impassable.
Tom doesn't do drama. He just delivers, and drives "defensively". Aged 47, he has been delivering around Co Wicklow since he was 21. Beside the neatly-tied bundles of post on the dashboard there's a scrap of paper with a phone number on it, belonging to a man who has asked him to watch out for a stray horse.
He has the numbers of Blessington and Baltinglass Garda stations programmed into his mobile in the event of "something strange". As we pull up at a bungalow and there's no sign of life, he murmurs that the woman "should be here" because she minds children for neighbours; two minutes later, we meet her on the road, waving cheerfully, and the mystery is solved. Up a two-mile boreen, we drive to the back of a house observed only by a majestic, white, Sphinx-eyed goat.
"No, no one's here, the car's gone," says Tom. So who owns that other car? "That's always here", he says, dropping the post in the letter-box. Elsewhere, a young lad comes to the door. "Not back at college yet? Gran keeping well?" inquires Tom.
Up at windswept, beautiful Ballinabrockey, a two-mile ramble off the beaten track, past stone bridges and impassive sheep, he pulls up at the locked entrance to a holiday home, invisible behind a hill. As he drops a letter into the box on the gate, Tom nods: "Ah, he's down" (as in, down from Dublin). How could he tell? "New tracks in the lane". Obvious, really, when you know where to look.
In Athdown, a couple of miles up the narrow, old military road (more a boreen), he drops the post into a slit in a wall, then takes a small stone from the top and slots it neatly in the slit. The house below is still a building site so when the owner makes his intermittent visits, the stone tells him he has post.
So far, the people we have met are able-bodied and mobile. A surprising number already have roadside post-boxes, about 40 per cent, Tom reckons - an unusually high figure in national terms. But this is a relatively affluent area that has been forced to become security-conscious, given its uneasy mix of isolation and attractive hit-and-run distance from the west city suburbs.
City and local people who build new houses here install electronic security gates almost as a matter of course. The post-boxes then go on the gates. And with them, a feature that the nation has long taken for granted, the postman's daily check on a whole community, is fast fading.
Mary Jane Murphy epitomises the kind of person many had in mind this week when they balked at An Post's latest cost-cutting proposals. At 91, she lives alone in her isolated dwelling, mentally sharp and able to make her own bread, but hard of hearing and dependent on a Zimmer frame. Her only official contact is with a health visitor, who calls once a week. A busy letter-writer, with a beautiful hand, she expects Tom three to five days a week.
"Anytime between one and two o'clock, there's a knock and I've a fair idea it's Tom," she says. She sits by the cooker with a view of the window and a few years back when she saw interlopers heading for the door, she reached it in time to turn the key in the lock. Thirty minutes later when Tom turned up, she was still shaking with fright. "If anyone finds me lying on the floor, I'd say it'll be Tom and I won't mind if it's him," she says.
Tom, a pragmatic sort, accepts the burden manfully. He's much more likely to come across a situation like the elderly woman he once found, sitting in the dark, with her front door open on a winter evening. Her light-bulb needed changing. "So I went down to the bedroom and took a bulb from there. It's the kind of thing that means nothing to nobody - except yourself, sitting in the dark."
Pat McGrath, a 77-year-old retired sheep farmer from Cloughleagh, is as fit and feisty as a 60-year-old and won't countenance any suggestion of dependence. But he admits to worries about strange lads that come skulking around the house and has had to ring the gardaí about them. And he worries about the security of road-side boxes: "There was a time when the dairy men couldn't leave milk churns on the side of the road because you'd have interference and vandalism with them. Can letter-boxes be much different?"
Simon Murphy, the postmaster in Baltinglass, recalls an elderly woman who wrote once a week to her sister on the other side of the Wicklow hills, simply to ensure that the postman would call, "because she'd see no one from one end of the week to the other".
Murphy is a clear-sighted businessman, who says it costs him money to have three postmen operating from his premises. An Post's roadside-box initiative would probably reduce the number of postmen he accommodates so, in theory, he should support it. And he sympathises with the uneven battle faced by An Post.
"John Hynes [An Post chief executive] is only responding to the pressures that are on him to work within financial constraints. An Post are not getting paid for talking to elderly people or turning on a tap or changing a fuse," comments Murphy. Nevertheless, he believes that it's another step in the wrong direction.
"As a society, we have lost the plot. We might as well call ourselves Americans. You only ever see a garda in a squad car now. If you see one on the beat, it'd have to be the Pope he was there for . . . We're totally gone on the economic agenda and that applies to the four pillars of rural living - communications (which includes the post offices and postmen), health, security and transport."
Even the Communications Workers Union (CWU), the one that stands to suffer the job losses - 500 to 1,000 delivery jobs could go, they reckon - sympathises with An Post's predicament, amid deregulation, no control over pricing and constraints on every side. They have had to accept automated sorting already - "no point in being a Luddite", says spokesman Stephen Fitzpatrick, "if we don't do it, someone else will".
As for the roadside boxes issue, Fitzpatrick sees it as a choice we must make as a society: "If we as a nation want An Post to perform a social service, then we have to pay for that."
And even while An Post's spokesman, John Foley, insisted repeatedly it had no intention of abandoning vulnerable people, the politicians continued to protest in terms of the postman's role in community life being one of "support as well as postal delivery". None of them, not Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs, Eamon Ó Cuiv, nor Fine Gael's Fergus O'Dowd and Simon Coveney, nor Labour's Brian O'Shea, nor the Green's Eamon Ryan, nor Independent Marian Harkin, suggested a solution for An Post.
Even more infuriating for the semi-State, was the suggestion by Dan Neville, the TD for Limerick West, that it might be responsible for more suicides as a result of its decision. But Neville comes equipped with impeccable credentials; he is also the president of the Irish Association of Suicidology.
"Before the advent of the letter-box, he [the postman] knocked at every door and interacted with the people . . . Rural people in isolated areas saw the postman as the only contact outside of Sunday church and weekly shopping," he says. Tom Gethings believes as many as 10 per cent of the average round would "need to see a postman, would like to know he's calling. They could be recluses in their 50s and nonagenarians like Mary Jane. I'm not spending my day lying over gates talking to people. But you'll meet someone for two minutes who'll tell you he's not well and you'll have a chat and go down to Bridget a mile away and ask her to keep an eye on him. Two minutes can make a big difference to someone who's isolated."
But is that An Post's job? "All we're doing," says An Post's John Foley, "is running a business as cost-effectively as we can, under instructions from the Regulator and from our shareholder, the Minister for Communications, Dermot Ahern. We are very conscious of our relationship with the community but we are not a social service - if we are, we get no reward for it".
It's not only An Post; the face of rural Ireland is changing rapidly. There are already 80,000 roadside boxes throughout the country. Foot-and-mouth prevention measures saw many farmers put letter-boxes at farm entrances to minimise the number of visitors. Meanwhile, more than 200 post offices - once the sacred cows of local political resistance - have disappeared in the past few years.
"Even though there are more houses being built in the country, it's more vacant," says Tom Gethings, "because these places are just dormitories with both parents gone all day. Society is changing, people are getting caught up in themselves, caught up in the fight to survive. Where you do have people at home, you'll find them living behind doors with dead-bolts as well as locks because they don't know who's going to walk in on them. I've often come upon doors that have been kicked in."
It's changed in others ways. This Thursday, out of 30 pieces of mail for one townland of 20 houses, just one is a personal letter. (An Post puts social mail - birthday/Christmas cards etc - at about 20 per cent of the total). Any old hand can see the rest are social welfare communications, billets doux from the Revenue Commissioners, milk cheques, Readers' Digest bumph, mail order catalogues and credit card statements. According to Tom, there's very little in a post-box worth stealing and locks deter only honest people.
Athdown has a little green post office box in a wall. "Someday there'll be something in it", says Tom, turning the key in it anyway, as he does every day. But it's empty again today.
It is a sign of the times, a symbol of why An Post has to adapt and is sometimes caught unawares by the speed of change, as with the one million Christmas cards that were still arriving in the New Year. "We learned our lesson", says Foley, "it won't happen again". An Post, like every other company, is having to toughen up.