Mr. Gary Delaney:

The point was made that the last four characters of Eircode would be random because we could not make them sequential due to the problems that would be caused by new builds. That makes absolutely no sense. Nobody but Capita, in the design document, looked for a sequential code in the first place. In the design document in which Capita engages with An Post, it asks specifically whether the code should be sequential.

The reply from An Post was that it did not need it to be sequential because it delivers by local knowledge. We now have a code that is random because An Post said it should not be sequential and the reasoning for that is that a house built in between two other houses would put the sequence out. We deal with imperfect sequences every day of our lives. It is a mild inconvenience. To say that we would make something random, by which is meant it has no visual intelligence, purely because a sequence might be mildly out of sequence and a mild inconvenience makes a nonsense of the code. It also means, incidentally, that we do not have localities, which should be in the code according to the legislation.