National Postcodes to be introduced

formerly scottish paddy

Jack180570 wrote: »

We are the laughing stock of Europe with Eircode. Today the BBC printed an article
'Eircode: Shannon airport relocates under Ireland's new postcode system'..

Do you think that there were no hitches when the UK introduced postcodes?
Believe me they were plenty and still are! These systems are constantly being updated and corrected, so give it time. The UK system can work fine in cities where it has streets and house numbers to work with, but try using it in rural areas (which I have) and they can cover huge areas, which is useless for finding individual houses.

tvc15

tvc15 wrote: »

Technically the postcode is part of your address so could be put in the address box but Eircode need some better PR,

True, but they have a separate box for the town? Just makes it look bad...

G_R

tvc15 wrote: »

Eircode need some better PR, on the radio this morning the head of Eircodes didn't even seem prepared for the Shannon in Limerick question, apparently there's an easy fix just to use the 'geographical' version of the address which they have from GeoDirectory!

I work in Marketing/PR and I'm cringing at how badly they are handling things.

Just simply rephrasing their answers and using their Twitter account would have gone a long way to making the launch a lot smoother.

I'd nearly be tempted to go help em out!

FishOnABike

[Deleted User] wrote: »

It will be interesting to see how long it will take for the postcode to be used to direct mail rather than the written address, in the UK for example all mail is sorted using the postcode.

WE could have a situation where the postcode (Athlone Westmeath) is ignored and the mail still going to Roscommon town before being redirected to Athlone for delivery in south Roscommon.

An Post alread have one of the world's most sophisticated OCR based automatic sorting systems which currently reads the (postcode less) address and allows them to deliver over 98% of their letters next day.

There's no reason why post addressed "Cornafulla, Co. Roscommon" should be sorted differently to "Cornafulla, Athlone". The geo directory should show both (and any Irish variant of the same address) are the same location and is just outside Athlone town.

irishgeo

any of the big online shops supporting it yet?

seamus

"Support" is a loose word. Many places have already "supported" Irish postcodes in that you were permitted to enter anything or nothing there for an Irish address.

So I used my new postcode (two of them in fact) on Amazon yesterday, and they were accepted. But that's likely because Amazon doesn't bother validating that field for Irish addresses.

Sam Russell

TheChizler wrote: »

At the risk of sounding accusing I can't help but feel you're being deliberately obtuse at this point. As has been pointed out this is not an address in the conventional sense, it is a "postal address" which does not carry the same criteria in forming it as a conventional "geographic address". It will generally be of the form house, road, town land, local sorting office, county of local courting office. It is not geographically based. They point this out multiple times on their website. An Post are the only ones who can declare whether a "postal address" is correct or not. As they do not publicize their route map there is no way to categorically state whether a "postal address" is incorrect or not, beyond details like house name or spelling, which there are a few examples of but they're in the minority. Eircode don't claim to provide a "geographical address".

The aim of the website is to provide a code to someone which they may search for based on a "postal address" or data from a few other sources, including a map which will remove all doubt if you are unsure what your "postal address" is. It also provides the opposite, the "postal address" and a location on a map if you input an Eircode. If you came to the website looking to obtain an Eircode based solely on a "geographical address" or a "geographical address based on an Eircode then unless the two addressing systems happen to be the same for the property you are looking up then you're going to be disappointed, as this is a service that Eircode provide or claim to provide.

That's all I'm saying on the matter as we're going around in circles at this point.

The traditional address scheme for Ireland for non-urban addresses was:

Townland, Barony, County. No confusion and no issue - been that way for over a century. All townland names are unique within their Barony and every barony name is unique.

Now An Post have introduced a new entity - post-town.

So now we have:

Townland, Barony, Post-town, County.

The problem arises when the Post-town is in a different county. There has been problems with Athlone, Limerick. Waterford, and other places where the Post-town is in another county. Now An Post could deliver post whether the post-town was included or not, and generally it was omitted in this kind of case.

This problem has only come to light because of Eircode's introduction. The solution is the omit the County from the address and add the word Via before the post-town.

So our default address becomes:
Townland, Barony, Via Post-town.

and Shannon Airport becomes:

Shannon Airport, Shannon, Via Limerick - no County mentioned, neither Co. Limerick nor Co Claire.

Another own goal for Eircode - not their fault though.

plodder

Sam Russell wrote: »

The traditional address scheme for Ireland for non-urban addresses was:

Townland, Barony, County. No confusion and no issue - been that way for over a century. All townland names are unique within their Barony and every barony name is unique.

Now An Post have introduced a new entity - post-town.

So now we have:

Townland, Barony, Post-town, County.

The problem arises when the Post-town is in a different county. There has been problems with Athlone, Limerick. Waterford, and other places where the Post-town is in another county. Now An Post could deliver post whether the post-town was included or not, and generally it was omitted in this kind of case.

This problem has only come to light because of Eircode's introduction. The solution is the omit the County from the address and add the word Via before the post-town.

So our default address becomes:
Townland, Barony, Via Post-town.

and Shannon Airport becomes:

Shannon Airport, Shannon, Via Limerick - no County mentioned, neither Co. Limerick nor Co Claire.

Another own goal for Eircode - not their fault though.

Baronies have fallen out of use substantially, except maybe in legal addresses used in land registry etc. But, counties are important components of addresses and I thought that postal addresses should have always used the correct county even if the post town referred to is in a different one. Though in that case, people would be complaining that Limerick was moved to county Clare. Really this Shannon airport thing is no more than a silly season caper. There are more serious aspects to this saga than this.

SpaceTime

The lack of simultaneous launch on at least one commercial mapping platform doesn't bode well at all.

It'll have to be in services like Google Maps, Hailo, Garmin, Tomtom, Apple Maps etc before anyone takes it seriously.

Sam Russell

plodder wrote: »

Baronies have fallen out of use substantially, except maybe in legal addresses used in land registry etc. But, counties are important components of addresses and I thought that postal addresses should have always used the correct county even if the post town referred to is in a different one. Though in that case, people would be complaining that Limerick was moved to county Clare. Really this Shannon airport thing is no more than a silly season caper. There are more serious aspects to this saga than this.

You may be right, but Baronies are part of addresses and they should be used as the preferred address form within the Geodirectory. Perhaps the best solution would be to use the form:

Shannon Airport, Shannon, Co. Clare - Via Limerick.

ukoda

SpaceTime wrote: »

The lack of simultaneous launch on at least one commercial mapping platform doesn't bode well at all.

It'll have to be in services like Google Maps, Hailo, Garmin, Tomtom, Apple Maps etc before anyone takes it seriously.

This is 100% true, it's only when it starts to become useful will people actually take it serious.

It got a rough time on Twitter but most of that was bandwagoning as some of the claims of Twitter couldn't possibly be true, it started to trend and everyone wanted a "eircode story" to tweet about. A lot of people tweeting they were disappointed they couldn't join in because their ericode was 100% accurate.

As you all know, I've defended the code itself. But the launch was pretty poor job by capita, very bad PR management from the start and even worse incident containment measures.

That ericode Twitter account should have been in full swing explaining the reasons for the address mismatches but instead it was left up to other users.

Most of the stuff on Twitter now seems to be acknowledging that the counties issue is a pre existing geodirectory issue and that it's a postal address not a geographical address.

BailMeOut

SpaceTime wrote: »

The lack of simultaneous launch on at least one commercial mapping platform doesn't bode well at all..

do not agree. It is the government's job to build and deploy the infrastructure and that's it. We are now at day 2 of this and what happens next is that some companies will jump all over this and innovate while others will not. Some will make money and create jobs, others will not. Who knows at this stage as we are just at day 2 and my guess is that Eircode will change a lot of how we do business in Ireland (for the better) however this is going to take time.

How great will it be when you order say home heating oil and they just ask you for your Eircode and that's it. No more endless hours on phones with someone on a truck trying to find your house in middle of winter.

mayway

I see that Malahide has a code of K36 and Swords has a code of K67.

For some reason the Swords estate of Waterside has a code K36.

I know that was plenty of debate on this in the past but I thought that it was all sorted out.

Also, Portmarnock, which is in Dublin North County and had an address of Co. Dublin has been somehow transferred to D13 thereby lumping it in with Donaghmede, Baldoyle, Clarehall, Bayside, etc. Is this an official change? Or a mistake?

G_R

mayway wrote: »

I see that Malahide has a code of K36 and Swords has a code of K67.

For some reason the Swords estate of Waterside has a code K36.

I know that was plenty of debate on this in the past but I thought that it was all sorted out.

Also, Portmarnock, which is in Dublin North County and had an address of Co. Dublin has been somehow transferred to D13 thereby lumping it in with Donaghmede, Baldoyle, Clarehall, Bayside, etc. Is this an official change? Or a mistake?

It's where their post is sorted.

If it was "resolved" before, I'd imagine it was more to do with An Post saying "fine, call yourselves Co. Dublin" but it was probably always sorted in the D13 office. Now there is postcodes, the routing key matches up to where the post is sorted.

Tenshot

Not sure if it's already been mentioned in this thread, but the Eircode Address Database Product Guide (all 108 pages of it) addresses a lot of the questions/concerns people are raising here.

I'm impressed by the amount of detail available for each address; also for the amount of effort they seem to have put into handling Irish variants of address names (Conradh na Gaeilge's PR stunt yesterday not withstanding).

I'm in favour of Eircode, but they do seem to have scored a couple of own goals that could have been avoided. Clearly distinguishing between "postal address" and "geographic address" in the results (and making the geographic address the default displayed) would have avoided a lot of the confusion.

I also think the 15-lookups-a-day is way too low, at least initially. Let people do 100 lookups/day for the first six months until people are comfortable with it.

Ideally, the whole thing should be made completely free to access on the basis that its benefit for the greater good outweighs any short-term commercial gain. I won't hold my breath though...

fricatus

I heard about this on Matt Cooper's programme yesterday and had a little look at some addresses local to me. I've lived in the UK and a couple of other countries, and used postcodes there, so I'm finding the Irish ones all a bit odd...

What's the crack with these "routing keys"? Waterford for example seems to have ones beginning with P in the west of the county (presumably because the post towns are the likes of Youghal and maybe Fermoy?) and E in the north of the county because of Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir. The main three however seem to be X35 for Dungarvan, X42 for mid-Waterford/Kilmacthomas and X91 for east Waterford (city/Tramore) and South Kilkenny.

As far as I can see, there are no others beginning in X, so why not just shorten it to X1, X2 and X3 to make it easier to remember? Or else why not use X01 all the way up to X99 and then make the rest of the code shorter? If I go to an online store finder (say for Aldi) and enter X91, it doesn't know whether my nearest store would be Tramore, Ardkeen, Ferrybank, city centre, etc. If I enter the full code, presumably Aldi would have to pay Eircode to see exactly where I'm living - so maybe that's the point? Y€$ I think it might...

The funny initial letters don't bother me that much, but what's weird is that H is Galway, but it's also Monaghan! A could be the southside of Dublin, or it could be Dundalk, but Dublin Airport (in the middle) is K! So the initial letter doesn't even give you a reliable indication of where the code is. By the way, these strange letters are meant to be language-neutral according to the guy on Morning Ireland this morning. So why D for Dublin? Did they actually think this thing out at all?

I get the distinct impression that this is a case of Irish public administration trying to be all clever, reinventing the wheel, and failing miserably because they've ignored international best practice. Anyway, I'll just update my address online and forget about it.

SpaceTime

You can just delete their cookies & go again!

moyners

SpaceTime wrote: »

You can just delete their cookies & go again!

Or use the incognito tab (or equivalent)

long_b

fricatus wrote: »

I Anyway, I'll just update my address online and forget about it.

Where can you do this ?

Fred Swanson

This post has been deleted.

astrofool

fricatus wrote: »

I heard about this on Matt Cooper's programme yesterday and had a little look at some addresses local to me. I've lived in the UK and a couple of other countries, and used postcodes there, so I'm finding the Irish ones all a bit odd...

What's the crack with these "routing keys"? Waterford for example seems to have ones beginning with P in the west of the county (presumably because the post towns are the likes of Youghal and maybe Fermoy?) and E in the north of the county because of Clonmel and Carrick-on-Suir. The main three however seem to be X35 for Dungarvan, X42 for mid-Waterford/Kilmacthomas and X91 for east Waterford (city/Tramore) and South Kilkenny.

As far as I can see, there are no others beginning in X, so why not just shorten it to X1, X2 and X3 to make it easier to remember? Or else why not use X01 all the way up to X99 and then make the rest of the code shorter? If I go to an online store finder (say for Aldi) and enter X91, it doesn't know whether my nearest store would be Tramore, Ardkeen, Ferrybank, city centre, etc. If I enter the full code, presumably Aldi would have to pay Eircode to see exactly where I'm living - so maybe that's the point? Y€$ I think it might...

The funny initial letters don't bother me that much, but what's weird is that H is Galway, but it's also Monaghan! A could be the southside of Dublin, or it could be Dundalk, but Dublin Airport (in the middle) is K! So the initial letter doesn't even give you a reliable indication of where the code is. By the way, these strange letters are meant to be language-neutral according to the guy on Morning Ireland this morning. So why D for Dublin? Did they actually think this thing out at all?

I get the distinct impression that this is a case of Irish public administration trying to be all clever, reinventing the wheel, and failing miserably because they've ignored international best practice. Anyway, I'll just update my address online and forget about it.

It's all been thought out, one of the requirements was to keep the Dublin postal addresses insofar as possible, hence the D for Dublin.

Having driven around rural UK with postcodes, having eircodes should make things a lot easier in Ireland. The cost is meant to keep it self financing, so all the updates and corrections will be covered by the commercial use of the system.

fricatus

long_b wrote: »

Where can you do this ?

My bank, pension, HR in work, Amazon, etc. That's what I was talking about.

Sheldons Brain

Sam Russell wrote: »

You may be right, but Baronies are part of addresses and they should be used as the preferred address form within the Geodirectory. Perhaps the best solution would be to use the form:

Shannon Airport, Shannon, Co. Clare - Via Limerick.

This project has elevated the postal town as the "address" rather than as the postal address which might be shown with the geographic address. There may be a case for this reorganisation of space, but I doubt if anyone thought much about it.

"A**" being in south Dublin and also Dundalk/Castleblayney with D and K in between is rather odd.

long_b

fricatus wrote: »

My bank, pension, HR in work, Amazon, etc. That's what I was talking about.

Ah. I need to get the actual postal address updated. I'm sure hundreds of others do too. Can't seem to find a definitive answer on how to get it done.

dr.fuzzenstein

ukoda wrote: »

Pretty complicated way of just using incognito mode or deleting cookies!! No need for a browser extension

Good that people are developing stuff already tho

It has to be said, the 15 address limit is not exactly hard to get by, it's almost like they don't mind too much if you get past. If they really wanted to restrict it to 15, they would probably ask people to create a login and password, though people would just create several logins.
It's almost like the 15 limit comes with a bit of a wink and a nod...

ITDemo

ukoda wrote: »

Pretty complicated way of just using incognito mode or deleting cookies!! No need for a browser extension

Good that people are developing stuff already tho

It's intended for those who aren't tech savvy. Someone can install it for them and they are good to go!

plodder

Apparently, Portmarnock has been in D13 for some time, but didn't know it. There are a couple of other similar cases. Also "A" is not exclusive to South Dublin. There are "A" areas in north Dublin too, and probably elsewhere.

TheChizler

Tenshot wrote: »

Not sure if it's already been mentioned in this thread, but the Eircode Address Database Product Guide (all 108 pages of it) addresses a lot of the questions/concerns people are raising here.

This is an excellent spot, the amount of data the database supports is staggering. They include fields like common misspellings of addresses, previous details, verification level of Irish translations, groups etc. Not an easy database to design, integrate, and manage. The actual codes themselves actually are only the tip of the iceberg.

TheChizler

An interesting section from that document:

Eircode Product Guide wrote:

The following are the complete list of rules that have been implemented when allocating
Eircodes:
 Not similar to other Eircodes in the same building
 Not similar to Eircodes with the same building name, group of buildings, street, or
townland
 Not similar to Eircodes with the same building number and similar street names
 Where adjoining Routing Keys meet, the same Unique Identifier segment of the Eircode
within each are not physically close, designed to be at least 300 metres apart.
Where the address entered cannot be easily verified with the corresponding address, it is
recommended that alias address information is checked to assist verification. Alias information
is covered in section 2.1.
If Eircodes were simply allocated randomly, rather than our rules based approach, then our
calculations indicate that eight percent of addresses would have Eircodes that would be liable to
address verification issues. While every effort has been made to mitigate this issue, we cannot
guarantee 100% that all instances of address/Eircode verification confusion have been resolved.

So the last four digits are ANYTHING but random.

ukoda

TheChizler wrote: »

An interesting section from that document:



So the last four digits are ANYTHING but random.

I posted that guide before and the capability of the ECAD. There's so much more to it. But people choose to ignore it.