Meeting called to support Carrigans postmistress
By Carolyn Farrar
A public meeting has been called to support Carrigans postmistress, Bernie Moore, who was informed this week that An Post was terminating her contract at the end of August.
A meeting is set for 8 pm on Monday, at the church hall on the main road in Carrigans, to discuss the future of the Carrigans post office and to show support for Ms. Moore. Donegal North East Oireachtas members and Inishowen Electoral Area county councillors, as well as the north-west operations manager for An Post, are also being invited to attend.
The postmistress, who has served Carrigans for more than 30 years, received notification of her termination on Monday. She said she could not comment on the matter.
Ms. Moore, represented by O’Gorman and Cunningham solicitors and barrister Peter Nolan, had appealed an An Post decision to terminate her contract at a hearing held in Letterkenny earlier this year.
Labour Cllr. Frank McBrearty, Jr., who has been campaigning for the postmistress and is one of the organisers of Monday’s meeting, said he has been in touch with Labour spokesperson for justice, Pat Rabbitte, TD, and expected the matter to be raised at the Dil.
He called for people to come out and publicly support Ms. Moore at Monday’s meeting. “It is gong to take people power to reinstate the Carrigans Post Office and especially to reinstate Bernie Moore, who has been a loyal employee of An Post,” he said.
There was no reason for the termination given in the letter, but the postmistress has been under pressure since February of 2009, when three armed and masked men held a terrified Ms. Moore at gunpoint at the post office at about 11 o’clock in the morning. It is believed that about 108,000 euro was stolen.
A Garda spokesperson said yesterday that the investigation into the robbery is continuing.
“You cannot protect yourself unless you have a 24-hour armed guard service at the post office,” Cllr. McBrearty said. “This is an excuse An Post has used to take away the service of a rural post office in a rural community.”
The councillor said the post office provided vital services to “a community that suffered from unemployment, from the troubles of Northern Ireland being on their doorstep and from the neglect of this county by senior politicians.”
Cllr. McBrearty said he got 700 petitions on a signature of support for the postmistress within a week.
The word has spread in the tight-knit community, and people have been coming into the post office since Monday to express their shock at the decision.
Mary Crossan, coordinator at the St. Johnston and Carrigans Family Resource Centre, said, “You’d be very hard pressed to find anybody who would say anything against Bernie Moore.”
She called the contract termination a “heavy-handed, inappropriate and really disgraceful way of treating Bernie.”
Ms. Crossan said the postmistress, who worked at the Carrigans post office as an assistant before taking on her current position, is also involved in the family resource centre’s committee, as well as with the local credit union committee and Deele College.
“She is very, very well respected and people are very angry and very annoyed that one of our own is being treated in this way,” Ms. Crossan said. “We need to be putting our full support behind Bernie because at the moment she’s up against it.
“I’m really hoping that common sense will prevail,” she said.
In addition to the loss of Ms. Moore as postmistress, the loss of the post office “will leave people who are vulnerable and isolated even more so,” Ms. Crossan said.
“Serious questions need to be asked about An Post and the reason they decided to terminate Bernie’s contract,” Cllr. McBrearty said.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Weather for Donegal
Monday 21 May 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 10 C to 18 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: South
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: 11 C to 20 C
Wind Speed: 15 mph
Wind direction: South east
