Mr. Liam O'Sullivan:

I am the mails operations director of An Post.

I and my team are responsible for the collection and delivery of all mail in the State and for all inbound mail from all other postal operators worldwide. An Post, as the national postal services provider, collects, sorts and delivers more than 600 million letters and parcels annually - 2.5 million to 3 million letters and parcels per day. An Post fully supports the introduction of the new eircode system and when it is launched we will use the code in our automated sortation systems and manual systems throughout the network.

The postcode design chosen by the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources through the competitive tendering process, on which Capita is doing the fine-tuning, developing and deployment, works for An Post. It works with our systems and we intend to fully utilise it.

In 2012 we completed a major multi-year capital investment programme, replacing and upgrading all our automated sorting machines and all of the technology behind that. We were well aware that a vital piece of national infrastructure was being rolled out and when specifying that equipment we had it designed in order that it could and would cater for the arrival of postcodes, now called Eircodes, in Ireland.

As the national service provider, we have been working closely with the Department throughout the years on this project. Since Capita was awarded the contract, we have worked closely with it. As Ms Patricia Cronin said, we will be carrying out the task of notifying everybody in the country, via mail next year, of what their Eircode is.

An Post has a detailed implementation plan for integrating the new codes into our mail operation, manual and automated. Execution of that plan is well advanced at this stage. Our target is to be ready by May 2015 in order that all our people and manual systems are ready to start to receive mail into our systems with the eircode carried on it and we are currently on track to meet that deadline.