Mr. John Tuohy:

My mother is from Newcastlewest, so I am very familiar with the situation. The address of all the townlands around there is Newcastlewest, regardless of where they are. It is another very good example. I believe the Department received a number of tenders and gave all of them a fair assessment, so I am comfortable with that. The most important consideration in implementing a public postcode system like this is that the national postal operator can use it. If we brought out a new technology that An Post could not use - I know it is not the only stakeholder in this - we would struggle to get people to adopt it in the market. The proposed system is not perfect for everyone's use but it is good enough for everyone to subscribe to. We will all have to tweak our systems and our processes to adapt to it, but at least most of the stakeholders in the market have signed up and said that it is a good idea. During the consultation period, when the Department and its advisers came to talk to us about this, the first thing I said to them was that we want a system that An Post can work with, because if An Post does not adopt this we will struggle to get it off the ground. An Post attended the previous hearing and it has said that it is a good system and it can work with it too. The alternatives were assessed by the Department and its advisers at the time. What we have come up with is fast to deploy. As it is so fast and easy to deploy, without getting involved in renaming or numbering or anything else, it will also be the lowest cost.

We are well overdue this. We are the only developed country in the world without a postcode system. We hear a great deal of talk about our smart economy and how we want to be the latest and greatest, rolling out broadband and so on. We are doing all this in the absence of a key piece of infrastructure, namely, a national postcode system. The solution the Department came up with is innovative. It is new, because every address has a unique identifier, which is not the same in other markets, but it is quick to deploy and will generate the lowest costs. That must also be taken into consideration.