Did you photograph all the post offices of Ireland?

No, I didn’t. I only photographed the post offices I found along my route during my holidays. Occasionally I may have deviated a little to get a photo of a post office in a village or town that was slightly out of my itinerary. On the other hand I skipped some others post offices because they weren’t what I was expecting or simply because I drove through the town and either I forgot to take a photo of them or I didn’t find them.
I don’t have any photo of the post offices in the big town or cities. This may sound weird, but the reason is that the larger post offices are often sad and dull like the post offices around the rest of the world. Besides I usually don’t visit big towns and cities. I’d rather see smaller villages and towns, where the Irish way of life is more Irish.

Did you require some permission to take photo of the Irish post offices?

Well, actually it seems that permission is not required. Once a lady at the counter told me that she never heard about the need of having permission nor did she know it was illegal to take photos of the exterior walls of these premises. But I think that asking inside before shooting the photo is a courtesy gesture, it costs nothing and it can avoid some nuisance that may arise from a behavior that could look like suspicious. In any case it’s always good to chat with the people on the other side of the counter. I had wonderful experiences with some of them that kept me talking for some minutes and told me some bizarre anecdotes and facts.
It seems, instead, that taking photos of the inside of the offices is not allowed, for obvious security reasons.

What if a post office you want to photograph is closed and you can’t ask anybody for permission?

In this case I take the photo anyway, but I try not to behave equivocally. I act like a tourist and make it clear that I’m just taking a photo for souvenir. Passers-by have to see me for what I am, a traveller who is just taking pictures.

Why are you doing this?

Because I think that Irish post offices are so nice to look at and so peculiar that they deserve to be photographed and collected in a single archive. Some of them have disappeared since I took the photo and some of them could follow the same fate in the future. This archive is a way to remember like they were. Unfortunately many other post offices have been closed down before I could see them, so they survive in the memory of the local people or in some photographs that somebody like me took in the past.