Mr. Gary Delaney:

I am not expert on post but I have researched this subject for quite a number of years. I could say to the committee right now that I will use Eircode because someone is giving it to me. That is a use but it is not a meaningful use. To put it into practice, in its hubs An Post sorts to delivery office level. To sort manually to delivery office level, one would use the first three characters of Eircode, what they call the routing key. There are 139 routing keys. By the way, this information is only coming out. It is not something that was delivered to everybody or to the committee. This information is just being extracted. There will be 139 routing keys, which are undefined areas. They do not have actual boundaries. They are decided by An Post on an ad hocbasis in the sense that if a postman is underworked in one area, he will operate an other area and that will get the routing key from the first area.

The Chairman just quoted the figure of 350 delivery offices. How could we manually fix 139 routing keys to 350 delivery offices?