Letters lost en route to Australia a cause of concern

Liam Molloy has repeatedly had a problem sending cards and parcels to his daughter in Sydney and it is not a small problem either.

He writes to say that “more often than not [they] do not arrive”.

He says that this year alone he has posted five cards at different times “and none of them arrived”. “This abysmal service is not unique to me,” he suggests and cites an Irish WhatsApp group in Sydney which also highlights the problem.

Having tried to raise the issue with An Post last year and not getting anywhere he took matters into his own hands, his mail continues.

“I inserted an AirTag tracker in my last card to see what is happening. The card was posted on November 13th, was delivered to the UK by boat and arrived in Heathrow on November 16th. Shortly after that it recorded its last known location in a residential area of Hounslow just outside Heathrow. At that stage it was obviously disabled as it didn’t update its location thereafter,” he writes.

He says that a carrier being used by An Post in the UK might have an issue and says the Irish delivery service needs to deal with it.

Liam points out – entirely reasonably – that cards from Ireland “are particularly important to emigrants in Australia”.

He acknowledges that An Post’s service in Ireland is “excellent” and says it should not “tolerate this blemish on [its] reputation and indeed will put in place some form of monitoring to ensure it does not recur”.

He says he wrote to An Post but adds that he has “been unable to get a response to what, on the face of it, looks like theft. One would expect that something as serious as this would be investigated urgently. I did receive a letter in February saying that my letter had been overlooked in a data transfer to a new system but nothing since.”

We contacted An Post to see if we could find out what was happening and what is being done about it and in response we received the following statement.

“We apologise to Mr Molloy for manner in which his issue was dealt with, which fell well below the standard of response and care we normally apply in supporting our customers. We appreciate his disappointment and the frustration caused by the non-delivery of his mail.

“Unfortunately, as we handle over two million mail items daily it is not possible to track individual items posted using ordinary post. On foot of Mr Molloy’s original complaint in December we instigated an investigation with our international mail partners. At the time the large amount of standard international mail to Australia over the busy period from November 23 to January 24 increased exponentially. We could not directly dispatch mail to Australia and instead mail was routed via London Heathrow where Royal Mail has a large onward airmail unit.

“Despite our best efforts and that of our international mail colleagues it has not been possible to ascertain what exactly happened here. It is possible that the mail item and tracker used by Mr Molloy came apart during processing, and this would account for the apparent delivery failure and the tracker location reading he received. We wrote to Mr Molloy on two occasions and while our records do not show any further response from him, we accept that we ought to have been more proactive in following up on the case specifics with him.

We would again like to apologise to Mr Molloy. There is no evidence of any interference or loss within the Ireland – Australia mailstream generally. We are committed to providing the best possible service and will learn from the way in which we failed to address the specific concerns raised by Mr Molloy.”