Noel Harrington (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I am a sub-postmaster in west Cork and, in that regard, at the end of the delivery chain in delivering mail. In the area in which I work there are approximately 600 delivery addresses. In one rural town there are five people with the exact same name and surname at different addresses. Equally, we had a situation where the delivery address was Castletownbere, Bantry. That was the correct postal address, but it was 35 miles from the Bantry area. Visitors come to Bantry, get off a bus and look for Castletownbere. The local community decided arbitrarily to strike Bantry from the address, which helped the tourism sector. They decided they would simply use Castletownbere, County Cork. It worked fine for that purpose, but it made deliveries a bit of an issue. There is a constant issue with non-unique addresses. I accept the point being made in that regard. However, I have a couple of questions.

At what stage in the conception or procurement stage of the process was it decided that it would be a unique address, a unique identifier postcode? Was it at the very beginning of the process? How are the X-Y co-ordinates embedded in the seven digit postcode and how can it be used for an ordinary punter who might want to use them to find a location? Are there data protection issues in that regard? Was any consideration given in the roll-out of the Eircode system to having a pilot project or area to determine what practical issues might be encountered in using the system? Was the tender designed to accommodate users with higher volume delivery items? As Mr. O'Sulllivan said, was it for operators with 2 million plus items per day as opposed to 10,000 large items per day?

Is there scope within the Eircode system to use non-delivery addresses in the future? Some of the issues in rural Ireland include where one has a delivery address to the home but adjacent to it may be a small engineering office or garage. Is there scope to use a second code to identify the commercial element where there is a mixed-use address?