The Shortcomings

The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Communications, Energy and Natural Resources established nine recommendations, Eircode does not satisfy any (Since the consortium chose not to follow them )

1. It is a public postcode that is proposed, not a “hidden” or technical code.

Database access is closed, website access is limited to 15 lookups, retailers must pay a €5,000 fee to obtain the database, much more to update their existing billing and maintain said database. It is definitely hidden, and was designed as such from the ground-up. Routing keys were not disclosed for instance, but were quickly crowd-sourced (see below )

2. It shall be structured, at least to the level of small spatial areas within each county.

With 135 routing keys, to identify which part of the country you live in, but no relation between codes for houses or neighbourhoods within the same area, you could be at very different locations.

For example, with “P25” you could either be in Ballycotton, Whitegate, Midleton or Castlemartyr (Or anywhere in between )

3. It must be easily memorised so that it will quickly gain a high level of maximum and accurate usage.

I’ll leave that to yourself, but I don’t think it’s the case. Postcodes in France have a unique code per city or town. In Brittany for instance, 29200 is Brest, 29800 is Landerneau and so on. Very easy to remember. Once you know your town’s postal code, that’s it. Compare that to T11R7B4.

4. It must be future orientated to meet the needs of a rapidly developing economy with a growing population.

The routing keys are an issue again. Existing keys would need to be subdivided.

5. It must be grounded in a technological solution that is cost effective, available, accessible, high quality and low maintenance.

It is none of these at present. The project cost €27m to develop, is not accessible unless you pay, is very low quality and high maintenance.

6. It must address the issue of non-unique addresses without asking people to change the name of their townland, parish or county or ideally any element of existing addresses.

This should be put to the 50,000 rural homes completely missing from Eircode.

7. It must be neutral as between postal operators. In particular, it must enable the postcode to be aggregated for operational purposes in whatever way each operator desires.

This is a weird one. The tendering process was flawed and reprimanded, albeit softly, by the EC. An Post was “compensated” €10m by the exsting owner, Capita plc, for being excluded from the process. Yet it is set to benefit the most in its only profit making activity, parcel delivery. And a new complaint for unfair state aid to An Post is being lodged to the European Commission by the Freight Transport Association of Ireland (FTAI).

Neutral you said?!

8. The approach to funding shall explore the option of self-financing /minimising cost to operators and government.

Having cost €27m to set up, and much more in the pipeline, this must be a Corporations-101 tantra, akin to Shell declaring ecological protection its fundamental pursuit.

9. It shall be capable of…

“Adapting to the emerging technological and legal environment with particular regard to mail delivery systems likely to emerge over the next 10–15 years. In particular it shall consider the modern communications methods available through satellite and 3G communications to asses if a postcode could be electronically identifiable globally using simple software which refers to modern mapping coordinates.”

I had to format this one. It feels like they forgot to insert it earlier and tried to fit it in Section 9. Needless to say, it is another fail. Eircodes are limited to mailboxes or households and are not available over GPS. So if you’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s no code to save you, and you can’t access it anyway.