Liz McManus (Wicklow, Labour)

The Minister is great at making promises and then not delivering on them. He promised that we would have postcodes in early 2011, but there is not a chance in hell of that happening now. How do these promises come about? I plead with him to ensure that we have the most efficient postcode system possible.

We cannot afford to do anything less and he needs to ensure that we have a unique identifier system. Nothing in the reports stated that the Data Protection Commissioner was saying that we cannot have a unique identifier. He said that there needs to be a debate. The Minister has had discussions and surely common sense will tell him that he should move to a unique identifier now and save a lot of money. This is better than going the route he is talking about, which is a cluster alpha numeric system that will be costly and will need revision all the time. The Minister talks a lot about market opportunities. The market opportunities of the unique identifier system are incomparably better than what he is proposing.

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