An Post
Irish state-owned postal service
An Post (Irish pronunciation: [ənˠ ˈpˠɔsˠt̪ˠ]; literally 'The Post') is the state-owned provider of postal services in Ireland. An Post provides a "universal postal service" to all parts of the country as a member of the Universal Postal Union. Services provided include letter post, parcel service, deposit accounts, Express Post (an all-Ireland next-day delivery service), and EMS (international express-mail service).
Background
An Post, the Irish postal service, came into being in 1984 when, under the terms of the Postal and Telecommunications Services Act 1983, the Post Office services of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs (P&T) were divided between An Post and Telecom Éireann, the telecommunications operator (rebranded as Eircom after privatisation in 1999 and in 2015 as Eir). At its inception, during the early years of the Irish Free State, the Department of Posts and Telegraphs was the country's largest department of state, and its employees (most of them postmen) constituted the largest sector of the civil service.
Prior to this, the Post Office in Ireland had been under the control of various Postmasters General, Irish and British, with the appointment of Evan Vaughan as postmaster in Dublin in 1638, generally accepted as the date for the establishment of a semi-formal postal system in Ireland. Oliver Cromwell's Postal Act of 1657 created a combined General Post Office for the three kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland, and England; the position was affirmed by Charles II and his parliament by the Post Office Act 1660.
As of 2020, An Post remains one of Ireland's largest employers but it has undergone considerable downsizing. In 2020, Munster's only sorting centre in Little Island, Cork closed. The closure of individual branches in rural areas has become a significant political issue.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “An Post” as irish state-owned postal service. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as irish state-owned postal service. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q482490. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1983, 1999 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “An Post” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.