Controversial postal system, Eircode, is one year old today. A plan to produce a national postcode system for Ireland was announced by in October 2013 by then-Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte. This proposal was broadly welcomed as Ireland was the only country within the OECD without such a system in place.

Speaking to Pat Kenny this morning, managing director of Eircode, Liam Duggan said that he expects its usage to increase even further in the coming years. 

"We're not disappointed with the uptake at all. We always said it would take three to five years for the system to come into full effect; we're only just at the end of year one."

Mr. Duggan responded to a survey, carried out by the CBRE, which found that 96% of companies in the logistics business do not use Eircode. 

"That survey is about six months old. What we know is that there's around 20,000 look-ups on our site everyday of the week. We know that the majority of these look ups take place between 9am and 5pm, so businesses are using the system."

Issues

Members of the Freight Transport Association, Ireland have been critical of the system since it first received a briefing on it back in July 2014, one year before the official launch. They raised red flags about the practical use of a system like this in their industry. They continued to express their concern at 'The Joint Committee on Transport and Communications on the difficulties its members have with the proposed "Eircode" postcode'.

"From the information available to FTA Ireland and its members, Eircode is clearly formatted and offered to the market as a highly elaborate and detailed address database. It tackles the problem of non-unique addresses by assigning a unique identifier to each private and commercial address. It will provide a high degree of information and functionality to direct mail marketers, utilities providers, academic institutions, the Revenue, social welfare services, the HSE, the Department of Education, the CSO, banks and charitable institutions. In short, anyone who deals with high-level population data, "big data" or who interacts with the public and customers via postal mail, will be satisfied with Eircode.

However, the companies represented here today do not fall into those categories, and crucially, they interact directly with people at their home address, their business, or in the field." 

Many have called for the system to be scrapped and for us to use a system similar to what is used in the UK. A recommendation was made by the National Postcodes Project Board Report in 2006 for a hierarchical 'ABC 123' postcode. The system we have is entirely different. Eircode is an unstructured, random letterbox postcode, accessible via database only.