Mr. Neil McDonnell:

I thank the Chairman and members of the joint committee for agreeing to meet us. Postcodes are a difficult technical issue, which we will try to keep as simple as possible. Ireland needs a postcode but not any code. A postcode is a key part of a country's soft infrastructure and is an indicator of a nation's social imagination and ingenuity. A national postcode lasts for a long time and the postcode that Ireland introduces next year will outlive everyone in this room. Eircode is an excellent address database for direct mail, for utilities, for the Revenue and for local property tax but it is a bad postcode. Eircode will assign a unique identifier to every address in the country but two adjacent properties will have different randomly-assigned Eircodes. The joint committee's briefing notes provided by FTA Ireland give some of the places that will not have a postcode and I will read into the report some of the types of places that will not have an allocated Eircode. These include workshops, farm buildings, windmills, piers, jetties, fields, large fixed assets, lay-bys, points of interest, lanes, archaeological sites, roads, natural features, intersections, accident black spots, pylons, parks, motorways, antennae, wells, graveyards, pumping stations, viewing points, manholes or utility access points, car parks, beaches, level crossings, transformers, bridges, forests, bogs, lakes, playing pitches, cycle tracks, picnic areas, public toilets or places along walkways such as the Wild Atlantic Way. None of these can have an Eircode unless they also have an allocated postal address.

In our opinion, Eircode departs substantially from the requirements for a postcode set out by members' predecessors in the last Dáil, which we have set out in annexe 2 of our submission, as well as in the postcode tender, the requirements of which are set out in annexe 3. In annexes 4 and 5, we compare Eircode with modern Irish and international alternatives, as well as with the United Kingdom postcode, which is almost 60 years old this year. We give a simple example of the address of our sister trade association in Belfast in annexe 5. Unlike any of these codes, an Eircode does not recognise when two addresses are adjacent to each other. We have picked three local addresses in Kildare Street to show this issue to members in annexe 4.

Eircode will impose a significant cost on small to medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, in Ireland for no tangible benefit.

The companies here today span the freight, parcel and energy sectors. Delivery to Irish homes and businesses is their day job. They know what they are talking about and they estimate that savings in the order of tens of millions of euro annually can be passed to the public via an efficient postcode system. As a national postcode, however, Eircode lacks vision, imagination, ambition and, most of all, practicality. Ireland needs a modern, open, location-based postcode with a useable structure and sequence. We here today ask the communications committee to use its influence with the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Alex White, to forestall Eircode's introduction as a national postcode before it is too late.