Mr. John Tuohy:

I thank the committee for having us here. I have provided hard copies of our presentation. There has been much discussion about the Eircode system proposed by the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. We are in favour of the system proposed. It is very innovative, has been well thought out and is particularly suited to the conditions in Ireland, particularly in rural areas, where up to 60% of addresses are not unique. As the largest privately owned parcel delivery business in Ireland, we support Eircode as it is proposed. Last week was our peak shipping season. Given that coming up to Christmas, my company will have made approximately 500,000 deliveries in Ireland, we are well qualified to talk on the topic. I have been interested in the topic and have followed it with great personal and business interest for approximately 25 years. In 1989, I wrote my first letter to An Post to inquire about the introduction of a postcode system for Ireland.

From some of the media coverage and presentations to the committee, we know there are concerns about the proposed system. I have knowledge of postcode systems in other jurisdictions, particularly the UK, given that we have a substantial delivery business in Northern Ireland and work with the UK postcode system. We are aware of the deficiencies of the UK system, particularly in rural areas. In the debate about the appropriateness of Eircode, people often ask why we cannot use the same system as the UK. In my presentation, members will see a road, the R106, which runs between Malahide and Swords in north County Dublin, which I have used as an example because I am from Malahide. Two of the basic principles of the UK postcode system are that all roads must be named and every property on a road must be numbered. While it might seem reasonable, in this example, when one leaves Malahide one is on the Swords Road, whereas when one reaches Swords the same road is called the Malahide Road.

Under the UK postcode system, the road would have to be renamed with one name, or we would have to define the point at which it stops being the Malahide Road and becomes the Swords Road. I invite members to think about it for a minute. Naming anything in Ireland can be contentious. For example, there was much debate about naming the new Luas bridge over the Liffey. As a nation, we do not like such change. If we decided not to rename the road in my example, we would have to draw a line across it to determine where one ends and one begins, and this is a potentially contentious issue for the people who live along the road. The same could apply to many roads in Ireland.

Having overcome this contentious issue, we would have to number all the properties on the road. On the map, members will see that there is considerable open space along the road, as in many rural roads. If we numbered all the properties, for example from one to 100, and a new property were built, the number sequence would be out of synch. We would have to renumber every house on the road or introduce sub-numbers. This is why naming every road and numbering every property would be potentially divisive and very time-consuming and expensive. Almost every road which we would name and number would involve a debate with the people who live there as to what it will be called and what number each house will have. The UK was the first country to introduce a postcode system. It was originally introduced in London in the 1850s, but it took until 1977 to complete the process of implementing it across the UK, with most of the work done between the 1950s and the 1970s. It took almost 20 years for the UK authorities to give everything a name and number, because it was so divisive and contentious. It was a very costly and lengthy process. With the Eircode system, whereby every property has a unique identifier, we can build new properties along a road without having to renumber or rename anything.

The next slide in my presentation is about current challenges and I have permission to use the example of a customer of ours, Pinewood Healthcare, a manufacturing business based in Ballymacarbry. Its address, according to its website, is Ballymacarbry, Clonmel, County Tipperary. However, in its official address on the An Post website, Ballymacarbry is spelled “Ballymacarbrey”. Locally, the name of the area is spelled without the letter “e”, and this is common for addresses in the area. If I were a truck driver, leaving Dublin to make a delivery to this factory in Ballymacarbry, I would probably drive to Clonmel and then start looking for Ballymacarbry. However, Ballymacarbry is actually in County Waterford, and is 17 km away from Clonmel.

Differences between local and official spellings of place names are common in Ireland, and the Eircode system will allow us to leave them as they are. We need not change anybody's address or spelling. When this factory gets its Eircode next year, a truck driver will not go to Clonmel to look for the factory, but will put the Eircode into the navigation system, which will give directions to the door. The reason the postal address is Clonmel, County Tipperary is that the postal route that covers the area comes from Clonmel. In Ireland, there are many postal addresses which do not reflect that actual location, and Eircode will allow us to keep all this in place while adding the Eircode to the address.

Eircode will also help with the issue of non-unique addresses, which applies to 60% of our rural addresses. My surname, "Tuohy" is quite prevalent in the west of Ireland.

My father came from a townland near Portumna in County Galway. Everybody's surname in the townland was either Tuohy or Conroy. In the old days, when my mother wrote a letter to my grandmother in County Galway, she would write my grandfather's name and his father's name in brackets after it so that the postman would know which Tuohy family to deliver it to. The properties in that townland had no name or number. The postman knew their location by the names of the people who lived there. The roads to those properties did not have names either. The introduction of the Eircode system is a great idea because it will allow all those aspects to remain the same. There is no need to change the name of a road. The houses in a parish do not need to be numbered or given a name; they will be simply given a code. That means a courier, postal operator, appliance repair man or ambulance driver can drive straight to the door of a property without the need to change any of the attributes in terms of the address. It means that everyone with the same surname in a townland can have the same address, but the addition of an Eircode will allow us deal with the non-unique addresses. That phenomenon is quite unique to Ireland, and the addition of an Eircode will allow us to address that very well. It is particularly appropriate for Irish conditions, and this is before we talk about those areas in the Gaeltacht where addresses are in Irish and there may be particular nuances in terms of the Irish language. There is no need to change any of that; all that is needed is that an Eircode be added and everything else will remain the same.

To return to the point I made about the way the UK postcode works, locations in rural areas pose particular challenges in the UK. There are approximately 20 million addresses in the UK but there are only 1.7 million individual postcodes. If one were to round up those numbers, one would say there was an average of 100 addresses per postcode, but in urban areas such as London and Belfast there might be four addresses to a postcode and in an area such as Fermanagh, with which we are quite familiar, there could be 100 addresses to a postcode and a single postcode could cover 20 sq. km. This is an issue not only in Northern Ireland but in the highlands and islands of Scotland, where the postcode system is inappropriate for locating individual addresses. I hope I have dealt with that issue. The UK postcode system has its own challenges in terms of rural areas, and that is precisely the issue that the Department and its advisers have tackled in terms of the non-uniqueness of rural addresses in Ireland. They have done a good job on that. I recommend that we press on with the schedule of implementation of the Eircode system as proposed.

To summarise, the introduction of the Eircode system will allow people to retain their current address without the need to change the name or number of a property. Roads will not need to be named or renamed. It will give a unique identifier to every rural address in Ireland. A feature of the Eircode system that might be helpful for Deputies is that it will allow a TD to write to all his or her constituents. Currently, it is not possible to define the addresses in a constituency unless one goes to a public library and checks the electoral register. It will allow a TD to identify the Eircodes of all the properties in their constituency and to communicate better with the constituents in an area. It is also possible to sectoralise, which would enable a Deputy to deal with an issue that is presenting in one part - as opposed to all parts - of their constituency. The Eircode system will allow for that to be done, whereas currently I do not believe it is possible.

I will respond to any questions members may have.