The Lost Post
The chaos following the collapse of Express Couriers casts a harsh light on the decline of the P&T and the firms which are trying to take its business. A Dublin solicitor, Quentin Crivon, with the firm of Hugh J. O'Hagan Ward, received a letter on November 9 which suggested that he might recommend Express Couriers as letter carriers for a number of organisations with which he did business. Mr. Crivon declined, his main reason being that since the letter from Express (delivered by an Express courier) took thirteen days to arrive at his office, he could hardly recommend the firm.
The chaos surrounding the collapse of Express Couriers has thrown a harsh light on the activities of such firms and on the parallel decline of the postal service run by the Department of Posts and Telegraphs.
On October 9 Express Couriers picked up an envelope from the Advertising Standards Authority for Ireland, in Kildare Street, The envelope contained a cheque for £1,950 to be delivered to a designer's office in South Frederick Street, no more than two minute walk away. The envelope never arrived. Later that month the ADAI sent advertising copy to the Irish Times and Independent via Express. It didn't arrive. Young Advertising Ltd. had a similar experience. On September 7 they gave Express a letter to deliver to Southside Newspapers, in Dundrum (the Express office is in Dundrum), and it arrived September 14. As a result, the paper lost an advert, the advertiser was annoyed and the agency embarrassed.
Ballyfree Farms claim that they lost over £400 in interest payments due to delay in delivering a letter. Back in August, Executive Travel Ltd. grew alarmed when a large number of airline tickets despatched to customers via Express went missing and warned couriers that they would be liable any expenses incurred through fraudulent use of the tickets. Morris Dental Company of Rialto puzzled when only a small number dentists turned up for their trade show at the Burlington Hotel on October 12, until they discovered that the invitations to the show - entrusted to Express - had in many cases been delivered only the previous day, although sent four days before the event. Morris was also facing a claim for the replacement of an instrument costing about £100, which Express had failed to deliver to a dentist in Dun Laoghaire and - even worse - the loss of a valued customer as a consequence.
All over Dublin there were business firms whose post had gone astray, been delivered late or not at all. In the weeks leading up to the collapse of Express Couriers the following firms complained about the service: S.E. Ryle Ltd.,Transmeridian Freight Ltd., the Office of Consumer Affairs, Barrett's Warehousing, Harrington Bannon, Executive Travel, St. Vincent's Hospital, the Dept. of Trade and Commerce (on behalf of Gorta), Bryan S. Ryan, Keegan' and Meredith, Swiftfreight International, Ballyfree Farms, Rathmines Motor Services, Swastika Laundry, AEF, Hospital Enterprises, Euro Aluminium, Abel Alarms, Patrick Brock and Sons, Alpha Ltd., Scales and Co., and Graphocolor.
Over the same period the following firms cancelled their contracts on the basis of inefficiency: General Stationary, Central Shipping, Studio 3, ASAI, Temperature Control Services, NCR, Huet Motors, John O'Reilly and Partners, Young Advertising, Forwarding Services, Bradley Williams and Co., Reliable Packaging, Hughes Dairy, Albright and Wilson, the Commissioners of Irish Lights, Gorta, and Michael J. Lucas and Son.
The usual excuse given by David Lewis or Michael Clancy, who were running Express, was that the mail had been mishandled by some incompetent courier whose employment had since been terminated or that the problems were "due to rapidly expanding business". In fact, the service provided by Express seems to have been chaotic in the extreme and the problem stemmed not from individual faults but from the attempt by a private firm to opportunistically cream off a profitable section of the mail business from a state service which is itself being cut back and which is em broiled in bureaucracy.
The courier firms which blossomed during and in the wake of the 1979 postal strike (thought some existed previously) to provide two services, almost exclusively to business firms and large institutions. The first is an express delivery of documents ad packages, picked up from one office and delivered immediately by motorbike to another office somewhere else in the city. There is a minimum rate for this service, about £2.50, with surcharges for distance, additional drops, waiting time, etc.
The other service is an attempted replacement of the existing state postal service by undercutting postal rates, the "sticky label" service. The courier firm sells a roll of labels, each of which serves as a stamp. The user will have regular consignments of mail to which the "stamps" are applied and which is picked up from the user's office on specified days. The mail is then sorted at the courier firm's office and is delivered, supposedly within 24 hours.
The advantage of the former service is obvious, where firms have to get documents, cheques, etc., delivered on the same day. The second service in theory guarantees swift delivery and is attractive to firms which have suffered delays through the P&T. For those with regular bulk mailings the service is also cheaper, undercutting the P&T by half in some cases.
The post office unions, however, point out that the service is (a) illegal under the 1908 Postal Act, and (b) unreliable. An executive member of the Post Office Workers' Union, Terry Delaney, recently organised an investigation of seven firms offering the service. Only one, Pony Express, was unionised. Five of the seven told the young man who approached the firms on behalf of Delaney that he need not bother with PRSI or tax, and it was up to him if he wanted to continue drawing the Labour. Perhaps most important, for couriers who are handling hospital records, cheques and confidential documents, not one, according to Delaney, sought a reference.
This casual approach (some firms have advertised for couriers on a "bring your own bike" basis) seems to be confirmed by the collapse of Express. Mail was reported to be scattered around the offices of the company in Sandyford Road - including medical records and cheques. (A National Children's Hospital letter, entrusted to Express, which details the current medical status of a three year old child quite casually came into the possession of Magill in the chaos that followed the courier's collapse.)
An ironic consequence of the inefficiencies of some courier services is that postal workers have had to clean up the mess. Quite often mail is simply dumped into the nearest P&T box. From there it goes to the district sorting office, is fixed with a special "tax" stamp at twice the usual P&T rate and is delivered by the ordinary postman. Apart from the fact that this means an extra delay, the recipient of the letter must then pay the tax to the postman - usually 52p for a letter. Again and again clients of Express complained that the people to whom they were sending mail were being charged 52p for the privilege. One P&T district office used - last month alone - £150 worth of tax stamps on such mail.
It would appear that the dumping of courier mail has become so prevalent that the couriers themselves have had to begin taking measures to counter it. One firm, Paperlink, run from 79 Lower Gardiner Street by a Mr. Tony O'Connell, has as a precaution against the mail being found in the street, been franking the items it deals with. The franking reads: "Private courier despatch. Do not put into postal system. Return to 79 Lower Gardiner Street. £1 reward per item".
Despite the POWU claims that the couriers are contravening the law by delivering mail - a service which is supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, who can apply the appropriate safeguards - official bodies have not been slow to use the courier services. We have evidence that both the Department of Transport and the Department of Industry and Commerce have used these services, as have the political parties. In May of this year Fine Gael paid £168.59 to Express Couriers for its services that month.
T he reason that the couriers have thrived - even when as inefficient as Express - is the failure of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs to meet the demands put on it. Complacency in the P&T has been noticeably lacking among the people who actually do the work, the members of the POWU. During the recent election, postmen and sorters dug into their own pockets to the tune of £2 and £3 each to raise funds for adverts in the national papers demanding 'that the decline of the service be halted and . .that action be taken against the couriers.
Individual postmen point out that they can literally feel the decline of the service by the declining weight of their bags. They claim that a survey showing that the couriers have been creaming off £5m a year was a conservative one. This year, instead of an approximate thousand casual postmen employed for the Christmas rush, the figure is expected to be nearer 300. The postal unions have proposed schemes for express delivery services, for cuts in the cost of the service in order to encourage greater volume, for schemes such as the production by the P&T of packets of cheap pre-franked Christmas cards and envelopes, and the setting up of a marketing department which would actively promote P&T services.
They have had little response. Although both Albert Reynolds and Paddy Harte committed the Department to setting up an express courier service, with headquarters in 'Ballsbridge, nothing has been done. The demand has palpably been there, yet the Department has stood back while private operators have rushed in with disastrous consequences, in the case of Express.
While the consequences have been bad for business firms, hospitals and other institutions which were burned by Express, there have also been consequences for the ordinary user of the P&T. With the private firms creaming off a large and profitable corner of the market, the ordinary user - who buys stamps in twos and threes to send personal letters and who cannot bulk-buy rolls of labels - faces increasing postal costs as the P&T puts up prices and cuts back services. On the day that the P&T announced that Saturday and Sunday working will be cut back from January 16, one large courier firm sent a circular to its clients offering a weekend service. Coincidence or inside information?
On October 7, as Express rushed closer to calamity, Seamus Ryle, Managing Director of S.E. Ryle Ltd., wrote to Michael Clancy, Managing Director of Express. He said that the service was appalling, items sent to the Central Bank had been damaged and had to be reprinted, mail had not been collected in three weeks, a customer had phoned demanding a cheque which Express had been given to deliver four days earlier. In concluding, Mr. Ryle said: "I'm a believer in private enterprise but so far your company is letting the side