PAC told Eircode usage will increase dramatically

The levels of awareness and usage of Eircodes will increase dramatically this year as the new postal system starts being used by more government departments and private companies, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been told.

The Secretary-General at the Department of Communications Mark Griffin told the committee there had been “a significant increase in activity” since the Eircode system was launched last July and he said he was confident acceptance levels among the general public would rise throughout 2016.

Eircode is a seven-digit postcode given to every property in the State.

He said An Post was now using it as part of their sorting system while Government departments including Revenue and the Department of Social Protection had started using it on their correspondence late last year.

Mr Griffin also told the committee that Electric Ireland would start issuing bills with Eircodes from next Monday.

He welcomed news, reporting in The Irish Times, that the National Ambulance Service of Ireland is to start using Eircode from the middle of next month.

Martin Dunne, the director of the service, said the processes involved in updating the emergency service’s systems to adapt to Eircode was almost complete.

“We are in the process of training our staff now and I would anticipate that the systems will be up and running in the middle of next month,” he said.

“It will take time,” Mr Griffin said. “I would expect to see a big increase in the level of visibility over the course of the year.”

He told the committee that project would cost €38 million to implement and said the roll-out had cost just under €22 million to date.

He robustly defended his department when challenged by Fine Gael TD Patrick O’Donovan as to why Eircode’s introduction cost significantly more than projected – with costs doubling between 2005 and 2015.

Mr O’Donovan also questioned Mr Griffin about the absence of a tendering process when employing some consultants used by the Department in the run-up to the Eircode launch.

Some of the consultants were retired State employees and Mr O’Donovon described the processes used to recruit them and the fees of as much as €150,000 as “outrageous”.

The charges were dismissed by Mr Griffin who also rejected claims by the committee chairman John McGuinness that the system was overly complex and that freight companies had stopped using it because it was inaccurate.

The Eircode identified is made up of an alpha-numeric code in two parts. The Routing Key comprises three characters and is the postal area governing that particular address. The second part, a Unique Identifier, will pinpoint an address and distinguish one address from another.

When asked why Eircode numbers were so complex he said simpler group codes which are based on clusters of properties “would have been useless” because 35 per cent of Irish homes have non-unique addresses.

He said a non-unique system “would be absolutely useless in rural Ireland. We have a fundamentally different type of problem in this State,” Mr Griffin said.