Mr. Mark Griffin:

There is a code for each of the individual addresses, 2.2 million of them, in the State. One of the first criticisms made concerned the need for a unique code rather than the sort of group code used in the United Kingdom. That would have been useless in terms of our system, where we have 35% non-unique addresses, something people assume is a bit of an issue. The nearest country to us in the OECD in terms of the number of non-unique addresses is Portugal, which has 2%. Therefore, we have a fundamentally different type of problem.

The code is unique. The first three digits are the routing key and the other four digits identify the individual property. I do not believe it is all that complicated. The freight associations raised an issue as to why they could not be sequential. There is a reason for that. If, for example, we look at housing policy, it tends to utilise, to the greatest extent possible, brown field and infill sites. Therefore, if someone builds a house, two houses or a block of apartments on an infill site in any town or city across the State, all the other postcodes on the far side of that development would have to be re-sequenced.