THERE IS a dreary inevitability to the announcement that the Government will introduce a nationwide system of postal codes by 2011. All sorts of codes, PIN codes, passwords for our computers by the dozen, RSI and passport numbers, car number plates, telephone numbers, now populate every facet of our lives and torment those of us whose memories are not what they were. For the sake of “efficiency” we strip people and now places of their individuality and represent them as characterless collections of numbers and letters. For we are now just cogs in the machine. This is progress. And who are we to stand in the way of civilisation?
Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan, admitted yesterday dismissively that there would be a “slight nostalgia thing” over this, but insisted that was a necessary price to pay for efficiency and that Ireland is now alone in Europe in not having postal codes.
The wretched things were first introduced, it should be noted, in Nazi Germany in 1941. The UK followed in 1959, and the US in 1963 introduced the ZIP code, an acronym for the Orwellian “Zone Improvement Plan”, and the system has there become so embedded that the postal service may refuse to dispatch mail if it does not have a ZIP code. Are we on that slippery slope too? Today 117 of the 190 member-countries of the Universal Postal Union have postal code systems – that means 73, shortly 72, do not. Today we stand codeless with quite civilised countries like Panama and Hong Kong.
But, no. “There are small upfront costs, but the returns across the economy are, in my mind, massive,” Mr Ryan says. Post codes will make it easier for the emergency services, we are told. They will save the postal and courier services millions in sorting time and shoe leather wasted in fruitless searches. Not to mention the millions in wasted fuel – a “carbon friendly” policy indeed, one company tried yesterday to claim.
A report from PA Consulting put the monetary benefits to the State at €22 million in the medium term. And then there’s the windfall benefits to the business card industry and to the direct-mail business whose members will deluge us with ever greater efficiency with advertisements we neither want nor need.
The adoption of an alphanumeric system makes some sense – incorporating a three-letter reference to town or city. Must we slavishly follow the example of English-speaking countries, where the postal code forms the last item of the address? What about know thy neighbour?