swan

I know the Irish often become the butt of jokes but this brought a smile to my dial.


Dublin - The Irish postal service has blamed wrong-shaped and brightly coloured Christmas cards for its failure to deliver one million items before the deadline.

A spokesman for An Post, the state-backed service, conceded one of the reasons for the delays was that many cards were unusually shaped, saying newly installed technology was unable to deal with them.

"We want to apologise to our customers and we share their disappointment - we should have done better," he said.

"It is true that our new system is geared to deal with business mail. The fact that Christmas cards come in lots of different shapes and colours did add to our difficulties," he explained.

The recent introduction of a new modern mail-sorting system designed to cope with regular, business post material rather than square or different shapes, late posting and increased volumes were also blamed.

An Post claimed it had delivered more than 8 million items in the pre-Christmas period and said that it would consider relieving the strain next year by instructing those sending Christmas cards simply to post them earlier. - Sapa-DPA