A Killylea woman has branded the local postal service a “shambles” after going three weeks without mail.
The woman, who did not wish to be named, has told how she previously complained to the Consumer Council, as she was “made to feel like a liar” after raising her concerns.
And while there was an improvement at that time – with “staffing shortages” cited – sadly it proved to be but a temporary relief.
Unless the sound of letters hitting her floor will be heard in the morning, by tomorrow (Tuesday), she will have been waiting three full weeks with no sign of any delivery.
On one occasion before Christmas, she shared how she had been sent an invitation to a festive event which she did not receive until mid-January – almost 60 days after it had actually been popped in the postbox.
The woman was prompted to contact Armagh I after reading how Upper Bann MP Carla Lockhart had secured and attended a senior management meeting to discuss “unacceptable” delays with the postal service in Banbridge.
Indeed, the Killylea woman insists that such delays are not just confined to Banbridge.
She said: “It’s three weeks tomorrow since we got post. This has been an ongoing thing for this past 14 or 15 months really. In the past it has been two weeks, and there was one occasion we got 14 letters after two weeks. This has been going on and on.
“I have contacted Royal Mail in Armagh and the man was anything but pleasant, and more or less said it’s my own stupid fault. He said they do not hold on to post. The second occasion I rang them was maybe June last year. The response was ‘do you have a cross dog?’. No, no dog at all. ‘Do you have a number on your gate?’. Yes. ‘Do you live down a lane?’. I do, but I think it’s in better condition than most roads!
“But he was blaming me. Everything was falling back on me.”
The Killylea resident felt she had no other choice but to pick up the phone and contact the Consumer Council, which she did last September.
“They investigated and it did ease for a wee bit then, for maybe a couple of weeks, but then it was back to square one again and I didn’t even bother a thing about it,” she explained.
When Consumer Council replied at the end of October, there had been an apology over delays in the postal rounds.
A letter to the resident had flagged, by way of explanation, “significant challenges with staffing over the past 12 months,”with “high levels of sickness and ongoing recruitment difficulties”. There was an assurance that Royal Mail “continue to work hard to fill vacancies and maintain services”.
The investigation by the Consumer Council official promoted the assurance: “While a delivery round cannot be completed in full, the undelivered portion is prioritised for the following day. The manager has assured me that it is extremely rare for the same part of a round to be missed two days in a row and that mail is not being held back intentionally. For example, on the 22nd of October, approximately one third of a round was missed due to staffing shortages but it was delivered and prioritised on the 23rd.”
This, the resident contends, is not the case in her experience.
She explained that her husband had been speaking to a woman who had sent them an invitation to attend a Carol Service. By that late stage, the event was the following evening, with the sender saying she had sent the invite several weeks previous.
“It was posted on the 20th November as an invitation to something on the 4th of December and I received it on the 16th of January. The people live in Killylea so it was obviously posted in Killylea. Would you believe that? It took a letter coming a mile up the road two months.
“I was expecting a letter from Belfast and I rang them there this morning. They said they posted it on Monday last week and is still hasn’t arrived.”
On another occasion, details confirming a dental appointment arrived after the date.
The resident recalls an earlier call to complain: “The boy in the sorting office in Armagh, he argued with me, ‘Don’t tell me it’s a fortnight since you had post’. I said, I’m telling you it’s a fortnight since we had post because I have cameras. I can tell you exactly.
“One day back in September, the 15th, we had two goes of post in the one day. My neighbours had the same. The post came with five letters at 11.15am and came back with four more at 2.20pm.
“He was quite nasty whenever I contacted and that’s why I didn’t ring him again. I felt I was wasting my time. He was nearly saying it was my fault and that I was a liar.
“But now, three weeks is a long time without post. It’s unreal, and then probably whenever it does come you get a whole pile of it.
“It’s an ongoing thing. We have a number on the gate and everything else. They just doesn’t bother coming down. It’s a different postman I believe every day or two and they just bung it in the back of the van and think, ‘oh, so and so will be on, he’ll deliver that’. Probably in the town or village they can walk round and that’s handy for them.
“They’re just saying really that it’s staffing issues, but it can’t be that bad that you don’t get post for three weeks.”
Branding the current service as “shambolic”, the Killylea woman fumed: “Everybody says it’s bad but most people get post once a week at least. I’m just fed up with it.”
