An Post chief executive David McRedmond probably has the best view of any chief executive in Dublin.
“I think so, yeah,” he says, as we admire the view from the rooftop of An Post’s funky new headquarters at the Exo Building beside the 3Arena in Dublin’s north docks.
We are looking south across Grand Canal Dock towards the Aviva Stadium in Ballsbridge. It’s where the river Dodder, the Grand Canal and the Liffey all meet. “This spot I love. This is Dubh Linn, the black pool,” he says, in a nod to the origins of the city’s name.
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“I don’t know. I wanted to do a [rooftop] party for the Taylor Swift concerts but we couldn’t do it for insurance reasons,” he says.
An Post moved to the Exo two years ago, quitting its historic GPO headquarters (although the post office and museum remain, along with about 200 staff). Although centrally located, McRedmond says the GPO was “just not fit for purpose at the moment” as an office and most of it needs to be “knocked down and rebuilt”.
He would like to see a museum of the Irish nation opened there, a place of pilgrimage for the diaspora.
An Post is paying annual rent of just over €7 million for the Exo, which houses 1,000 staff and is more than paying its way for the company, he says.
“Just in the pure marketing value, we get a multiple of that. If you bring in someone like Amazon or M&S, they come in and go: ‘wow, this is a company that’s really good on technology, really forward-looking’. They don’t think we’re just an old postal service. That means we win their accounts ... They do tend to look on postal companies as a bit old-fashioned so it completely changes the perception.”
McRedmond’s ninth-floor office looks into Dublin Port, which is apt given that parcel deliveries, turbocharged by Covid lockdowns, are now a big driver of growth at the State-owned postal group.
It delivered just over a million parcels a week last year, with growth of 20 per cent in this space already this year. That would be another 10 million parcels on an annual basis if that run rate continues.
He says it earns about €3 for each parcel delivered.
By contrast, letter volumes, traditionally the company’s cash cow, fell by 7 per cent last year, with a similar decline expected in 2025. An Post’s pivot away from letters to parcels (and financial services to a lesser degree) has defined McRedmond’s nine years in charge.
“My general philosophy is that all businesses are dying; you have to find the new thing. This year letter volumes will probably fall 7 per cent. So each year we have to find more and more [other business]. We’ve got to grow and that’s the challenge.”
Amazon is a big customer of its parcels business, along with the Chinese ecommerce giants Temu and Shein, “who are massive companies”.
British online retailer Asos is another big customer, along with Vinted, a platform for selling unworn clothes that launched into Ireland last October. According to McRedmond, Vinted had its best ever launch here and is already An Post’s fourth-biggest parcels customer.
“It’s such a cool idea. Vinted is the future. We’re getting a whole new cohort of young people going into post offices to post or collect their Vinted,” he says.
“We brought Vinted into the country and it was our marketing team who did it. I have the best marketing team in the country by a distance,” he says with a touch of hyperbole.
“We have the best brand, we have brilliant relationships with our customers and we work day and night to make sure that our customers know that we know what they want.”
It’s not all good news when it comes to parcels. Customs rules post Brexit have been a “nightmare” in terms of moving parcels across the Irish Sea.
“For us it’s a nightmare. We still return 5,000 parcels a week to the UK [typically parcels that go over the counter] and that’s got to stop. We have no choice. Customs say: ‘That’s got to return to the UK’, because there’s some mislabelling, or the value wouldn’t be correct.
He says parcels aren’t being returned to Britain with the same gusto by other EU countries, which simply turn a blind eye to the issue.
How does he know this?
“Every year I get PwC to send a whole load of parcels with incorrect information to their European offices and we see what gets returned, and only Ireland is returning. One or two do stop the parcels and a person has to come in and correct the stuff but that’s it.”
He wants Ireland to follow Europe’s lead by tweaking the Universal Service Obligation that requires it to offer a daily postal service to each house in the country from Monday to Friday.
“It’s changed in every European country, one way or another. Some of the countries have that obligation but they just bend the rules.”
Ireland was once famed for ignoring rules but McRedmond argues that we’ve become “too bureaucratic” and “risk averse”.
“The Government has fallen into the trap: centralise everything, regulate everything, control everything, have rules for everything. It’s not good and it needs to change now. We have an entrepreneurial spirt in this country and built brilliant world-class businesses, and can continue to do so, but not if we stay in that risk-averse, control mentality.”
McRedmond’s forthrightness tell the story of a man who will be 63 next week and is due to step down in September 2026. He was extended for three years following the expiry of his original seven-year contract, which is usually the ceiling for a public-sector boss.
An Post’s annual report for 2024 has yet to be published but it had a “brilliant year”, says McRedmond, who adds that its revenues exceeded €1 billion for the first time. Its Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) rose to €52 million, up from €38 million a year earlier.
It’s after-tax profit was €10 million.
“We need that because we need to invest typically about €25 million a year,” he says, citing how An Post needs a new, big parcel hub to keep up with the growth in deliveries.
An Post also now has about €100 million tied up in working capital. “And the faster we grow the more that will be tied up in working capital because we are a trading company now,” he says.
He is trying to persuade the Government to change the borrowing cap of €85 million, which dates back 40 years. “That needs to increase.”
If McRedmond had a free run, he would scrap the obligation to deliver to every household each weekday. Instead, he’d have a “brilliant next-day service that could be quite expensive, maybe another euro on it [the price of a stamp]”, using a digital stamp, probably with a later cut-off time for posting and a text alert when the mail is available to be delivered.
“A courier-level next-day service,” is how he describes it, while also acknowledging that such a move would cannibalise its existing Express Post revenues.
“But we would also have a [regular] two- or three-day service, which is where the bulk of the mail would go. What do people use a next-day service for? Usually birthdays and condolences.
“What we need to do with our delivery network is not have people visiting every house, every day when there’s fewer and fewer letters. It’s just not economical. And it doesn’t make a service sense either.
An Post has about 5,500 postmen and postwomen as part of its 10,000-strong workforce. Its overall headcount is due to be reduced by 1,800 by 2028 through efficiencies and great automation.
“We have to put labour on parcels and take it off letters, but at the moment we can’t do that,” he says.
On McRedmond’s watch, the price of a stamp has risen from 72 cent to €1.65. Some would argue that this has hastened the decline of letter volumes but he’s not for bending on the need for the service to pay its way.
“Letter volumes decline because of digitalisation, not because of the price of a stamp. We have to put up the price of a stamp because the number of letters has halved and you’ve got a fixed cost network so you have to put up the price. Every other postal service in Europe has followed us. I don’t make any apology about it because what’s way more important to an elderly cohort is that they have a local postman or woman, and that they have a next-day service. I have to do it in a way that’s economic so that’s why the price has gone up.”
RTÉ does a lot more that is good than is bad. At the same time I think it needs to transform a lot more
— McRedmond
Financial services is the other leg to the growth story at An Post.
McRedmond says its agency banking arrangements with AIB and Bank of Ireland mean that the post office is now “the high-street bank” in many parts of rural Ireland, facilitating basic cash transactions. “That is good business, good for postmasters. The cost of that to the banks is a fraction of the savings from not having to run cash operations. The reason the banks can get so many people digitised is because we exist.”
An Post also offers current accounts (which “needs to scale up”), foreign exchange, insurance options and a range of State savings products (€25 billion) but it has yet to offer mortgages, despite flagging its intention to do so a long while back.
“We need a partner to do that and I’d be hopeful you’d see something relatively soon. Not necessarily in mortgages but in terms of a banking partnership to grow our range of products.”
McRedmond will have completed a decade in charge of An Post by the time he leaves the company next year. Looking back, he’s most proud of the role the company played during Covid lockdowns and the way “we found new life for the company”.
It seemed a strange move for him in 2016 after a successful career in the private sector with book retailer Waterstones, telco Eir and broadcaster TV3 (now Virgin Media), where he would have earned a lot more money than his current annual salary of €250,000.
“An Post has been brilliant. I’ve never been remunerated less and I’ve never enjoyed a job more,” he says. “It is a really fascinating insight into Ireland and the world. We’ve moved from being a company that delivers letters to a trading company. It’s all about ecommerce now.”
A little over two years ago he was linked with the top role at RTÉ, amid the fallout from the Ryan Tubridy payments scandal. He was approached by a headhunter but fell at the first hurdle, after which his candidacy was widely reported by media.
“I thought I could do a good job at RTÉ and I think it is really important to the country. I like media, I miss media and I think it needs transformation.
“RTÉ does a lot more that is good than is bad. At the same time I think it needs to transform a lot more. The world outside is changing too fast so if you’re making small moves you’re becoming irrelevant. And I think RTÉ still has some big moves to make.
“Kevin Bakhurst has really steadied the ship. But now he needs to make some big moves.”
McRedmond was not happy about the public way in which his candidacy “became very public”.
“And nobody did anything about it. It was disrespectful to An Post and to the people and I didn’t like that. The nature of work is that sometimes you get approached for a job and of course I’m going to take a look at it, but it doesn’t mean you don’t like your current job or that you don’t want to stay in your current job.”
He says the board of An Post was “very supportive and the department was supportive so people were good about it”.
One final thing on RTÉ: he believes the broadcaster should quit its “immensely valuable” Montrose site, relocate its TV studios to Ballymount (where Virgin is based) and move its radio operations to a newly revamped GPO. “That would be fantastic for the city,” he says.
He was also the independent chairman of the Dublin City Taskforce that was formed in the wake of the riots in the city centre in November 2023. It was tasked with recommending ways to rejuvenate the city and drew up 10 big recommendations covering everything from policing and housing to street cleaning.
And a plan to tax tourists, to generate revenue for Dublin City Council. Needless to say, hoteliers are against the idea. “I think it’s not a bad idea. Everywhere I go I get taxed. I don’t see why tourists coming into Ireland shouldn’t get taxed here.
“[The council] only controls 12 per cent of the expenditure in the city. In most cities the local authority typically controls 35-45 per cent. It’s very difficult if you have no financing control and you have to go to a department to do something. It doesn’t work. I’m still awaiting decisions [at An Post] that are four or five years old.
“If [the council] could raise €50 million and invest it in public realm, I think that would be worthwhile and you’d get a good return on it.”
Having had a brush with cancer in recent years, he’s keen to remain active once his time with An Post is finished.
He stepped down as chairman of Eir last October and is looking to secure a couple of nonexecutive directorships to keep him active over the next few years.
For his remaining time with An Post, he would like to “reopen the UK” for Irish SME exports, which have declined in the wake of Brexit. “SME exports I think only account for 7 per cent of revenues of SMEs, and in most countries that could be somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent.
“We’re working very closely with Enterprise Ireland and we expect to do a major launch on that in the autumn. I would love to see An Post become an active engine to help Irish exports.”
CV
- Name David McRedmond
- Job Chief executive of An Post
- Age 63 on July 9th
- Lives Glasthule, Co Dublin
- Family Married to Penny McRedmond (an adviser to Minister for Health Jennifer Carroll MacNeill) and three adult children – son Ben and daughters Georgia and Finn (an Irish Times columnist).
- Hobbies “Reading. I’m becoming more obsessed with fiction. I’ve just finished For Whom the Bell Tolls [by Ernest Hemingway]. It was extraordinary, a fantastic book.”
- Something we might expect “I love sending letters.”
- Something that might surprise “I wrote my history thesis on church building in the 19th century in Dublin. It was one of the great urban programmes. It was after Catholic emancipation [1829], they had to build churches. There weren’t any. They built 30 churches. It was a phenomenal work programme.”
