February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
As the Echo went to press Tuesday evening, postal customers in the U.S. were being advised not to send anything by mail to Ireland unless by private courier, or by the U.S. Postal Service’s most expensive form of express mail.
This is not the way that the ever-increasing economic link between the U.S. and Ireland should be required to work.
Quite clearly, there are serious disagreements between postal employees and management in Ireland, and equally clearly there were less than successful attempts to resolve differences before the situation deteriorated to the point where the Irish postal service, An Post, has been sealing up mailboxes.
Those who keep a close eye on the day-to-day business of Ireland Inc. will have noticed recent headlines concerning threatened stoppages at airports and to public transportation services.
Presumably, these are not the kind of headlines that the Irish government wants Europeans and North Americans to be casting their eyes over during Ireland’s six-month stint as European Union president.
Granted, industrial relations is an exceedingly complicated field, even in the best of economic times. And the virtually daily developments in technology mean that management and employees are often left scrambling to adjust to changes not necessarily of their choosing.
But the ordered movement of mail, and the economic need of such order, is not new. It has been around for the best part of a couple of centuries and for the most part it has worked well, in Ireland as much as in the United States and many other nations.
All the more the shame that the delivery of often vital letters, checks and documents has been stymied not be hail, sleet or snow, but by the failure of people charged with such delivery to reasonably accommodate each other’s needs and requirements.
It can only be hoped that both sides to this damaging dispute settle their differences quickly. An economy does not run well when it forced to return everything to sender.