The last post

After more than 170 years there is no longer a post office in Corraneary.  Seamus Enright visited the townland on Wednesday of last week to witness the last collection of mail and spoke to postmaster Donald Howell whose family has provided the service from before the Famine. 

There was an air of finality when postmaster Donald Howell finally prised the digital scan point from the wall, its unwillingness to be removed perhaps symbolising a deeper reluctance to let go of a family-run institution dating back four generations. The framed barcode, feeding a real-time map of where and when postal collections are made to an anonymous Dublin-based computer screen, had bleeped for the last time. Corraneary Post Office, like almost 150 others, either closed or soon to close, was now off the radar.

Prior to shutting last Wednesday afternoon, the local service had been in Donald’s family for more than 170 years, since rural post offices first started appearing in otherwise isolated areas. That was in pre-famine times when matters weren’t merely measured for convenience by distance or population, rather how far a person could walk in a day.
“That’s where post offices were put,” says Donald.
The first outlet on record opened in 1864, originally at Knockbride “half-a-mile over the road” under the stewardship of Donald’s great-grandfather, Patrick Sheils.
When the post office made way for road widening in the late 1880s, the service moved to its present location at Corraneary, and Donald’s great-grandmother’s homeplace.
“The records for this are actually in London. We have good records from 1916 up, but pre that, the Royal Mail still has a lot of that original information,” explains Donald.
From a family of five, Emma, Donald’s grandmother would marry an Ordnance Survey man named Law from Fishguard in Wales, one of five men charged with tracing and grading the region’s undulating topography. Four men returned to England, while the newlywed Laws would celebrate the arrival of six children of their own.
It was Ronnie, Donald’s uncle, who took up the mantle of running the post office and shop, from around 1960 until his death in the early 1980s.

 

Successor
To maintain the family legacy, as much as continuing what was then still considered a viable enterprise, Donald was spirited home from Dublin where he had been working.
“It was sort of thrust upon me a bit. It was either that or close it down." But the post office business and neatly appointed store was "too good" to suffer such as fate, suggests Donald.
“Back in the day when a postmaster retired he could nominate a successor. You can’t do that anymore. It’s all contracts this and sign that. Nowadays when a postmaster retires, that’s it. It’s either advertised or it closes for good. We see it happening both ways these days,” says Donald, himself now a pensioner, a development that has further helped inform the decision to shut up shop. Henceforth he’ll have to draw that payment from the next neighbouring post office at Canningstown, almost three-and-a-half kilometres away.
When open however, Corraneary post office and the Howells’ community shop exemplified more than just the sum of its individual parts. The seemingly endless arrival of customers, friends and well-wishers to witness the historic final collection from Corraneary proved a genuine and heartfelt embodiment of that.
As a thank you to the community for all their support down through the decades, the Howells hosted a party for all their customers at The Drop Inn at Killann at the weekend gone past.

Big miss
Resting an elbow on the worn dark stained teak shop counter, surrounded by smartly presented household essentials, tins of dog food, batteries, copies of The Anglo-Celt, a box of jellied sweets and assorted hardware, Donald’s wife Hazel recalls: “A lot of problems were solved here. You were an information centre and sort of a counselling service on top of everything else. Come election time the whole country was run from here.
“We know it’ll be a big miss to the community, because they came in with all their troubles and woes, and happy stories too... I know we’ll miss the chat the most... the fun as well.”
With the post office gone, Hazel concedes it would have been difficult to keep the shop as a going concern too. They had a symbiotic relationship for many years, before both began to wane in relevance, giving way to modern advances, technological and otherwise.
Ledgers made way to digital signatures and touch keypads, and home deliveries at the push of a button to once weekly shops.
Back in the day the post office itself would have had up to 50 regular pensioners calling, on top of its other daily business, and the shop was equally nourished from that through trade.
“It was busy every day. The shop itself would have been open ‘til 9 or 10 o’clock each night. Now we’d maybe have down around 30 pensioners. Times have moved on,” says Donald.

Inevitable?
A small handful of letters and a daily report was all postman Tom Flynn had to show for his final trip, bidding farewell to the Howells before getting back into his van to leave to his next stop.
Was it a case of the deal on the table being too good to turn down? Or was the closure inevitable?
“A little of both I suppose,” Donald muses. “Really, when you look at it, it’s the right decision. It’s like someone emigrating, you know it’s the right thing to do and they’ve got to go, but when it comes to the bit it’s always difficult.”
The gradual winding up of the businesses started about a week before when some of the delivery men made their last run to supply the country store.
“Then it comes down to the last day, and the last pensioner, and the very last pension... that’s when it gets to you.”
The closure of Corraneary and others have been hastened by an increasing generational divide, believes Donald, between those for whom the post office remains an essential feature of our social fabric, and others who utilise it when all other options have been exhausted.
Part and parcel of the network’s downfall - the rising accessibility of the internet.

Pushed out
Donald points out that of five new houses built nearby, none are connected to a phoneline.
“It’s just another one of those things people are beginning to live without. It’s all mobile phones now and broadband if they can get it.
“People are so much online that the post office is almost divided into two separate main businesses. One is letters, just delivering the post, and of course that has suffered greatly because of emails. The other is financial services and all the rest with it, and a lot of that is online too. The way things used to be done are being pushed out. It’s all new, new, new.”
What then can be done to protect the future of the remaining network?
“It’s very hard to see how the whole thing will pan out,” says Donald. “They must become stronger, and I suppose the only way they can do that is to consolidate to good areas, and hopefully it can be maintained from there. But the whole thing has to be supported.”
For the likes of Francis McCormack, a long standing and regular customer at Howells country store and post office, what will happen in the weeks to come is uncertain. 
“Donald and Hazel are the best neighbours you could ever think of. They’re good to everybody, and I mean everybody, they always were happy to help you. It’ll be an awful miss. People won’t realise how badly the place will be missed until it’s fully closed.”
Betty McBreen, her husband Eymard, Pheilm Reilly, Luke Clarke and Andrew McBreen are huddled to a corner outside, standing beneath a vintage painted Corraneary Post Office sign. All agree that this closure and the removal of essential services is “killing rural Ireland”.
“You’d only be in town maybe every fortnight, maybe three weeks. You hadn’t to go anywhere,” says Luke Clarke, who remembers it being a ceilidh house too going back. “It’d be here you’d come, there’d be a fierce crowd in here every night.”
Pheilm Reilly blames the emergence of online technologies.
“This online shopping has made a hand of everything,” says. “It’s closed all the old country shops. It’s rural Ireland that’s suffering, stone dead. When they’ve pushed everyone into the towns the only place they’ll hear about places like this is in books, and they’ll probably be gone as well.”