Mr. Neil McDonnell:

The Senator is focused on the public expenditure side, given his position, and there is a transfer of the database, which is about €8 or €9 million in terms of expenditure. There is also an ongoing payment to An Post in respect of the database and there are other costs in the region of €20 million to €30 million. However, that does not factor in the cost to business if Eircode were pushed onto businesses. Much of the expenditure in the public service is on cleansing of databases. Businesses would have to cleanse databases to put in a post code that would do nothing for them. Businesses will have two choices, effectively. They may pay money to IT specialists to cleanse databases to adopt Eircode, which will do nothing for them. The other possibility, or probability, is that they will simply ignore it and bring in proprietary solutions of their own and we will end up with many different solutions. That has happened, for instance, with the major satellite navigation providers. Garmin has adopted an Irish solution called Loc8 Code and TomTom has come up with its own solution, MapCode. A State-sponsored solution would get around this multiplicity of post codes but unless someone gets a grip of it at State level, there is a danger of a plethora of solutions where there should be just one.