Mr. Liam Duggan:

Following on from the last point, the Eircode database contains no personal information. It does not contain names; it only contains address information. Therefore, nothing on the database can indicate whether someone is alive or dead.

The Deputy asked about optical character recognition and potential confusion with letters and numbers. We have stripped out areas of potential confusion. Where there is a "zero" and the letter "O" and even a "Q", which can be confused, we have gone with the "zero". Where the lower case "i" and the capital letter "I" can look like the number "1", we have left in the number "1" and taken out the lower case "i" and the capital "I". In verbal recognition as the letters "M" and "N" can sound alike, we have taken out the letter "M". Therefore, if someone is verbally giving a code and says "O", we will know that it is a "zero". There are 25 characters in the set, including the ten numbers from zero to nine. When the various letters are taken out, we are left with 25 characters.

We have gone through an exercise to take out rude or offensive and real names. Senator Eamonn Coghlan spoke about the backlash when we launched. With 25 characters in the second block - the unique identifier - the potential number of combinations, when 25 is multiplied by 25 by 25 and by 25, comes to 390,625. Members can believe me when I say that. We have taken out more than 90,000 potentially offensive and rude words, real names and so on. As an exercise, we bought online Scrabble. We looked at all four and three letter words and so on. We had our people based in Maynooth visually go through what was left and some unexpected things showed up when one was looking for words. If there is a "V" beside another, it looks like a "W" and thus can create something else.