An Post has announced a price hike for national and international stamps, with it to cost an extra 15 cent to send a letter anywhere in Ireland from next month.
From March 1st, the price of a national stamp will increase to €1.25, while an international stamp will cost €2.20.
The cost of a national 10-stamp booklet will remain at the current price of €11.
Anna McHugh from An Post said that despite the increase, Irish stamp prices remain lower than many European countries.
“The increases when they come in will still be less than the average across Europe by quite a bit. The average across Europe for the domestic standard letter is €1.58, and it will be €1.25 in Ireland,” she said.
“Similarly on the international prices as well, and that’s important to us, but we have to keep pace with costs – otherwise we jeopardise the overall service.”
The postal service said inflation is the reason behind the impending increase.
“We’re being hit on every side of our business by rapidly-increasing prices – transport up 18 per cent; electricity, gas, fuel up 27 per cent year-on-year,” Ms McHugh said.
“We’re not driven by overall profit, but we have to make sure that we have enough to cover the cost of providing that service where you pay a uniform price for a stamp for service no matter where you are in the country.”
'Hyperinflation'
The chief executive of An Post has said that the increase in the cost of stamps was in response to “hyperinflation” in the global post industry.
“An Post is rebuilding the postal infrastructure for the future by developing new service and product choices to suit how we live now and how we will choose to live, work, communicate and connect in the future,” he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland.
“If you look at something like air freight, with far fewer planes flying during the pandemic, and they're not yet back to schedules, they're up 340 per cent, so we've huge input cost increases.
“We hate doing these price increases, but overall the price increase is five percent which is the rate of inflation”.
SMEs that have an Advantage Card and those who buy the book of ten stamps would be exempt from the price increases for the rest of the year, he said, but he did not rule out further price increases.
“We don't know quite what will happen next year. If input prices change or drop, we change prices. Who knows where inflation is going? Hopefully, five percent - where it is at the moment - is where it will top out. None of us can predict that with certainty.”
Parcel prices to Germany, France and the Benelux countries were being cut by 50 percent because An Post had managed to “cost engineer” them in a way that was cheaper, he added.
-Additional reporting by Vivienne Clarke
