Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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322. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources if his attention has been drawn to the fact that the Eircode website was down for approximately 24 hours over the weekend of 25 and 26 February 2017; and his views on the matter. [10874/17]

Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein)
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323. To ask the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources his views on the fact that a piece of national infrastructure such as the Eircode website can have a 24-hour outage; and if consideration will be given to a more resilient offline global positioning service-based code for emergency services as a back-up. [10875/17]

Denis Naughten (Roscommon-Galway, Independent)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 322 and 323 together.

Capita Business Support Services Ireland, trading as Eircode, was awarded a 10 year contract in December 2013 to develop, implement, maintain and promote the National Postcode System "Eircode".

My Department referred the issue raised by the Deputy to Capita who have informed my officials that the Eircode Finder website, which remains very popular with the public with just under 10 million searches since the finder went live, was fully operational and not affected by the technical issues experienced by the Eircode website. The Eircode website is used to provide information about the Eircode system, including a directory of Eircode Business Providers.      

The National Ambulance Service (NAS) have integrated Eircodes into their own Computer Aided Dispatch system (CAD) and were not impacted. Having the Eircode integrated within the NAS system means that the patient’s address and the position of the nearest available ambulance can be accurately pinpointed on a digital map. Enabling an ambulance to quickly and accurately be routed to someone in need of medical help. In addition, Google now integrate Eircodes within their Google Maps app, both offline and online for use with GPS devices, was unaffected by the outage.  

The Eircode website is now fully operational and Capita have informed my Department that the technical issues they experienced is currently being investigated and their engineers are monitoring the situation.