Mr. Cyril McGrane:

Níl a lán Gaeilge agam, therefore, I also wish to give my response in English. I am the director of international trade for An Post’s mails and parcels business, as well as a member of the board of GeoDirectory. I am glad to be here to discuss the issues at hand. I offer our apologies for the delay in appearing before the committee, which was largely around the practicalities of the various notice parties being available here. Certainly, no disrespect to the committee was intended.

GeoDirectory is jointly owned by An Post and Ordnance Survey Ireland, OSI, and its primary role is to supply a geocoded buildings database to the market. As has been said, An Post’s official postal address database is one of the data sources used by GeoDirectory. Much of the relevant points for discussion have already been covered by Mr. Irwin, but I want to make a few points about An Post. Each year, my colleagues deliver 405 million mail items to 2.35 million address points throughout the country. That amounts to more than 2 million items per day. No other postal service in Europe kept as high a percentage of delivery routes open, delivering every route, every working day, and keeping almost every post office open during the pandemic in the interests of social inclusion and supporting communities around Ireland. We deliver mail addressed in Irish or English throughout the country.

Our aim has always been, and will continue to be, that mail addressed in Irish receives the same quality of service as mail addressed in English. Our standard operating procedures for staff contain methods for dealing with letters containing Irish addresses. All of this is in a context where many of our staff are primarily English speaking and increasingly some do not have Irish or English as their first language. As an aside, having spent a holiday around Ireland on the south and west coast last week, my wife and I found ourselves sending a daily postcard to our daughter who was in Coláiste UISCE in Belmullet. We dutifully posted one each day from various locations such as Dublin, Castlebar, Clonakilty and Kinsale, and the mail, which was addressed fully in Irish, was delivered the following day in each case, as indeed it should be.

The address and location data mentioned by Mr. Irwin, including Irish location names, are captured in a variety of ways such as during route updates with delivery staff, on the ground from street or development nameplates, from planning sites and brochures for new developments, or as a result of an address-related query. Where there is an Irish name within a designated Gaeltacht area, we record the locality in Irish along with its English alternative. This can include a spelling variation, an abbreviation, an alternative name or other versions of an Irish language name or Irish language abbreviation. Our website, www.anpost.ie, offers a facility for checking local addresses in both Irish and English.

As has been said, we at An Post have an robust system in place for delivering mail in Irish or English and within the Gaeltacht areas. We work with both Irish and English versions of addresses and the many variants of both that exist throughout the country. As with GeoDirectory, we use the official Irish names received from logainm.ieand we continue to work towards the most efficient way of delivering the mail to our Gaeltacht customers. We also continue to develop and improve the data and local knowledge on which we rely so heavily, conscious of the needs of Gaeltacht communities, working within and as part of those communities, and supporting the national language.