Mr. Gary Delaney:

I will make a couple of brief points before taking some questions. As I have said, Eircode does not deliver intuitive capability for ordinary people in Ireland. It has been suggested that Eircode is a core requirement for mail. I would argue that a national postcode should be about the widest breadth of national requirement. There was a suggestion that the Eircode app would do for non-core matters. It is well recognised that anything that depends totally on technology must have a fail-safe backup that can be used in a manual way, especially if it is being delivered by a state which has a responsibility to its people. Eircode cannot be used in any manual way.

I will make one more point before I conclude, if the Chairman does not mind. Much has been made of the fact that Ireland has non-unique addresses. This is a concern mainly for people who operate address database lists. The real problem in Ireland is ambiguous addresses. It is a different problem and a much bigger one. Everyone here has experienced the simple issue of standing in a busy street and not knowing which door is the right one. There might not be numbers on the doors, or an upstairs apartment over a shop might not be identified. The emergency services might be trying to reach someone who has collapsed and activated an alarm button. Eircode does not resolve the big problem of ambiguous addresses. It tries to rely on technology, including GPS, to resolve it. As a GPS expert, I can tell the committee that in my world, we would not rely entirely on GPS because it has many limitations. For example, it cannot and will not resolve the problems encountered in a busy city or town street or urban area, where there are upstairs and downstairs apartments and back and side entrances