An Post

Uh, or indeed, it's sitting on the hall table, [chuckles] uh, among the junk mail.

It's called Be Emergency Ready, and the government has sent one of these booklets to every household in the country with around two point two million copies being delivered by An Post over a three to four-week period.

And it gives advice on what to do if we suddenly find ourselves without electricity, water, communications, or transport, things we've all experienced to some degree during big storms and other emergencies.

But why are they sending it now? Why does every household need one? And is this simply common sense advice, or is the government preparing us for something more serious? Producer Anne-Marie Geraghty has been looking through the booklet and the thinking behind the campaign.

It also says every household should make sure everyone knows their Eircode, because that is an important thing when emergency services need to locate you.

Okay, and, uh, when should people receive the booklet?

So it, the, the, the nationwide distribution began at the end of September, early October, An Post delivering two point two million copies over three to four weeks, so you should have it.

Uh, I noticed different relatives across the country of mine were getting this booklet at different times, and we were all comparing it.

Now with

the clocks gone back and Christmas parcels starting to pile up, On Post has issued an urgent appeal to dog owners.

So far this year, animal attacks on postal staff have jumped to 118 incidents.

Joining us on the line to talk about why even the gentlest household pet can react to the postie And what we can do to keep everyone safe is Kate Fitzsimmons, dog training and behaviour specialist with the NSPCA.

So it depends on where people's dogs are.

If they are indoors or outdoors, you know, a lot of dogs are free roaming, you know, around the front and delivery.

Poster workers have to access the property to make a delivery.

They are the probably highest risk ones where we say, look, when we know that you have deliveries on Wednesdays or if it is in the morning, keep your dog secure inside or out the back so that a poster worker doesn't have to access or have a delivery point outside of your property or something like that so that we're not putting them in a situation where something like this can happen.

You get his name right, please.

Do you remember in An Post?

Yeah.

They used to do little Cyril the Squirrel, and it would be, like, 10 pound.

And you know what? Like, my background, I'm a primary school teacher, so we, I, I suppose I was a bit [laughs] overwhelmed by, you know, this business world I was kind of getting myself into.

So we really needed to, to make it as professional as we could from, from very early on, you know, like sorting out couriers and, um, you know, because trying to get from the north to the south wasn't ideal with, like, we were using Royal Mail that went to An Post and then, um, you know, it wasn't as ...

Sometimes we'd even find out that if we d- if we sent something from Armagh here, it would have went from here to a sorting office in London, from London to Dublin, and then Dublin on down to, like, the likes of Cork or, you know, somewhere else.

I was like, "That's crazy." So yeah, we got, we got a courier on board and, um, you know, we haven't really looked back since.

I will ignore the messages that have bad spelling, um, bad punctuation.

But what I will do is if I see a, a message that looks like a delivery bank or delivery message, I will go into the app, whether that's a bank or An Post or FedEx or somebody like that, and use the tracking that you had if you bought something.

So a familiar name or good wording or a picture of a padlock does not prove that a message is legitimate.

Okay, talk to me about Wi-Fi routers and the potential for problems with them.

There's also kind of, uh, across other unions, there's going to be solidarity with this public sector strike, so workers who aren't directly affected won't cross the picket line in other instances.

Um, I think this counts for some workers in An Post, so they're not actually striking, but they aren't, uh, they, you know, they won't cross the picket line, so there could be disruption there as well.

The NB or EU are telling bus drivers, for example, not to drive by a picket.

Yeah, so there, look, you could see massive disruption there.