National Postcodes to be introduced

Mountainsandh

swampgas wrote: »

The issue with the way An Post deliver to rural addresses is that it's based on the local postie knowing where you live. If you've lived there for generations and the postie is well established, it works fine. When you are newly arrived though, or when the postie changes over, it can all fall apart for a while until they learn it all over again. I have had the same with courier companies. You get the same driver a few times and it works out fine, then the driver changes and it's back to square one again.

A good postal system should not depend on years of acquired knowledge on the part of the person doing the delivery. Anyone should be able to pick up a letter or parcel, look at the address, and know exactly where to bring it.

We have lived here 12 years, and have had 2 postmen. The second one has been here years. It is not an issue with the postman in our case, it is at triage/dispatch stage I would think.

Again, the address on our post is the same address our post has been happily received at the past 12 years.

It now comes delayed with stickers stating "wrong address".

This has only been happening since start of summer.

I include the Eircode with most post I know I'm due to receive now, but some agencies are not (yet) able to input Eircodes, therefore my problem is not likely to be solved for at least some months, if not a year.

That's a lot of post to be delayed or lost in the meantime, some of it important.

ukoda

Mountainsandh wrote: »

We have lived here 12 years, and have had 2 postmen. The second one has been here years. It is not an issue with the postman in our case, it is at triage/dispatch stage I would think.

Again, the address on our post is the same address our post has been happily received at the past 12 years.

It now comes delayed with stickers stating "wrong address".

This has only been happening since start of summer.

I include the Eircode with most post I know I'm due to receive now, but some agencies are not (yet) able to input Eircodes, therefore my problem is not likely to be solved for at least some months, if not a year.

That's a lot of post to be delayed or lost in the meantime, some of it important.

I would imagine you'd update all your important mail to the "correct" address asap to avoid losing important mail, like banks and government etc. might be a pain to do but if An Post are enforcing your address now, you're going to have to do it regarless of eircode. I wouldn't be waiting around for eircode to solve it

Mountainsandh

I have updated some, aib still left to do, and to come back full circle to my original ranty post, motor tax cannot update to include Eircode, and possibly other agencies I have not thought about.Does HSE have capability to input Eircode ?

Since we were told on radio etc... that Eircode would not affect how we use our address, and would not change it, this is not a situation I had anticipated.
There isn't a hope in hell Mr M will change counties in our address since he's from our original address county.

Would you change counties because ...Eircode ... an post ?

ukoda

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I have updated some, aib still left to do, and to come back full circle to my original ranty post, motor tax cannot update to include Eircode, and possibly other agencies I have not thought about.Does HSE have capability to input Eircode ?

Since we were told on radio etc... that Eircode would not affect how we use our address, and would not change it, this is not a situation I had anticipated.
There isn't a hope in hell Mr M will change counties in our address since he's from our original address county.

Would you change counties because ...Eircode ... an post ?

If it meant the difference between getting my mail or not, then I think would

Maybe putting "via other county" might soften the blow? If that works

flushed busted

ukoda wrote: »

If it meant the difference between getting my mail or not, then I think would

Maybe putting "via other county" might soften the blow? If that works

I previously had previously enquired of your good self if the post code route keys were an actual reflection of the Post's organisation and whether they were actually employing those very same keys themselves.

One could take from this example, and from others which raised elsewhere, that the Post do not in fact rely on the route keys at all to assist their daily duties.

One might in fact advance the case that they derive no value from any part of Eircode and are now endeavouring to ensure that it does not become a substitute for the postal address that their systems and operators require.

If then, as one might suggest, route keys are not employed by the Post, one would have to raise the question as to why they were advanced as a design requirement to support manual sorting efforts by the Post in the first instance?

Mountainsandh

ukoda wrote: »

If it meant the difference between getting my mail or not, then I think would

Maybe putting "via other county" might soften the blow? If that works

No, the Via used to do the trick, but now that's probably the point they are trying to make, that the Via is not good, and they want the postcode.

You see, the way it works out is that it is Via Atown which is in County B, but we live in co A.

So we have to write :

Our address
Via Atown (in co
co A

It is the clash between Atown in co B, and the co A we live in that is the issue, only since the start of this summer though. :pac:

Tenshot

Mountainsandh wrote: »

I have updated some, aib still left to do, and to come back full circle to my original ranty post, motor tax cannot update to include Eircode, and possibly other agencies I have not thought about (....)
Since we were told on radio etc... that Eircode would not affect how we use our address, and would not change it, this is not a situation I had anticipated.

Just to clarify: are you getting the "wrong address" stickers even on letters that include your Eircode, or only on post arriving with your traditional address but no Eircode?

I'm assuming the latter, i.e. post from organisations that haven't yet added support for Eircode. If you're seeing these stickers even on post with a correct Eircode, then that's a much bigger issue since it directly contradicts what has been publically stated multiple times by Eircode.

(Not diminishing the fact that either way, it's a pretty annoying situation for you!)

TheChizler

Tenshot wrote: »

If you're seeing these stickers even on post with a correct Eircode, then that's a much bigger issue since it directly contradicts what has been publically stated multiple times by Eircode.

Eircode stated that they're not changing your address, An Post however get to use whatever they like as your POSTAL address. What's the issue though with putting your postal address on post and giving your geographical address for everyone else who finds you geographically?

Mountainsandh

Tenshot wrote: »

Just to clarify: are you getting the "wrong address" stickers even on letters that include your Eircode, or only on post arriving with your traditional address but no Eircode?

I'm assuming the latter, i.e. post from organisations that haven't yet added support for Eircode. If you're seeing these stickers even on post with a correct Eircode, then that's a much bigger issue since it directly contradicts what has been publically stated multiple times by Eircode.

(Not diminishing the fact that either way, it's a pretty annoying situation for you!)

No, the Eircode post arrives without trouble.
Only post without Eircode is delayed.

I think Eircode will be great when all services and agencies can add it to addresses in Ireland, at least for that aspect.

I rang AIB today, updated address for some accounts, but mortgage account address has to be done in writing.
So that's another bit sorted, and they were able to do it which is great.

ukoda

Mountainsandh wrote: »

No, the Eircode post arrives without trouble.
Only post without Eircode is delayed.

I think Eircode will be great when all services and agencies can add it to addresses in Ireland, at least for that aspect.

I rang AIB today, updated address for some accounts, but mortgage account address has to be done in writing.
So that's another bit sorted, and they were able to do it which is great.

So are you saying that if all your post had an eircode you wouldn't have any issues? I.e. You could write your address the "correct" way (as in the right county)

Tenshot

ukoda wrote: »

So are you saying that if all your post had an eircode you wouldn't have any issues? I.e. You could write your address the "correct" way (as in the right county)

More significantly, it would appear to be evidence that An Post are indeed paying attention to the Eircode and not completely ignoring it. (Which is just as it should be, of course.)

Mountainsandh

ukoda wrote: »

So are you saying that if all your post had an eircode you wouldn't have any issues? I.e. You could write your address the "correct" way (as in the right county)

Yes Ukoda, I believe that if I had the Eircode on all post, it would cancel out difficulties with my address, even the via a town in co A, with co B as my county.

It seems to have done so, so far.

Remember my discontent is more with the fact that, rather than update all government agencies, try and sell, spread, and ensure compatibility with big game like Amazon and Ebay, courriers, and then roll out Eircode, whoever was in charge adopted the "sure it'll be grand" attitude and fired it out there as is.

I also don't like that it's relatively meaningless to users unless they go online to check a target address.

Other than that I'm looking forward to using it.

ukoda

Mountainsandh wrote: »

Yes Ukoda, I believe that if I had the Eircode on all post, it would cancel out difficulties with my address, even the via a town in co A, with co B as my county.

It seems to have done so, so far.

Remember my discontent is more with the fact that, rather than update all government agencies, try and sell, spread, and ensure compatibility with big game like Amazon and Ebay, courriers, and then roll out Eircode, whoever was in charge adopted the "sure it'll be grand" attitude and fired it out there as is.

I also don't like that it's relatively meaningless to users unless they go online to check a target address.

Other than that I'm looking forward to using it.

Well it's a chicken and egg situation isn't it, do you launch it to the public so they know the code and then sell it to the businesses to implement it, or do you implement it and then give people a code.

You can't win really, if they had companies on board first before people knew their code you'd have the complaint - "sure what use is it in Amazon if I don't even have a code"

Personally, I would have sent it out first to people and then brought the service providers on board.

Mountainsandh

Tenshot wrote: »

More significantly, it would appear to be evidence that An Post are indeed paying attention to the Eircode and not completely ignoring it. (Which is just as it should be, of course.)

Yeah, I believe they do, but it's just me. I think, but it's a bit childish and fanciful on my part, that what happened is that I started using the Eircode, and whatever section/people usually deal with my post spotted it, thought "great, less time to figure out that one", and subsequently refused to deal with it the old way (or had thrown away/deleted the sticky guidelines for my address and the others who share similar). But I haven't a clue how things work there so it's just silly speculation.

It is a tricky situation as people 2/3 fields across would have a very similar address, but really are in the county the Via town is in. So they have Via + "right" county.

It never was a problem before though, and we were quite cocky about it when reprimanding UPS and other courriers !

Mountainsandh

ukoda wrote: »

Well it's a chicken and egg situation isn't it, do you launch it to the public so they know the code and then sell it to the businesses to implement it, or do you implement it and then give people a code.

You can't win really, if they had companies on board first before people knew their code you'd have the complaint - "sure what use is it in Amazon if I don't even have a code"

Personally, I would have sent it out first to people and then brought the service providers on board.

Not really, all it would have taken is to have the empty box sitting there until the codes were distributed. Sure don't we have the empty box/00000 half the time already ?

Instead we have a situation where the codes are now needed for An Post, at least in my case, and no box to stick them in.

(I think I was able to stick it in with Amazon anyway, sometimes if it'll let me I just add it in the address boxes.)

edit : I will stop posting here now for a while, unless I have something relevant and interesting, the An Post issue is only one aspect of Eircodes and I have made my point. I will update if I find that other agencies are OK for using Eircodes, that could be useful for some.

Tenshot

Mountainsandh wrote: »

Instead we have a situation where the codes are now needed for An Post, at least in my case, and no box to stick them in.

For those agencies that haven't yet caught up, I expect you could get away with just appending the Eircode to the end of the county name, with a couple of extra spaces before it, or perhaps as line 3 of the existing address, above the county name.

The most important thing is to get it on the envelope where An Post can see it; having it in an official "Eircode" box is mostly of use for the company capturing the information so they can easily do analytics on where their customers are.

Bray Head

Tenshot wrote: »

For those agencies that haven't yet caught up, I expect you could get away with just appending the Eircode to the end of the county name, with a couple of extra spaces before it, or perhaps as line 3 of the existing address, above the county name.

When I'm hand-writing an address I omit the county name altogether. From what I can tell it provides no extra information to An Post once you've included the post town and the eircode.

expectationlost

this is silly

Doubt cast on claim that most know eircode
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/irishnews/article4567496.ece €

Broughan asked about the implementation of Eircode and Minister of State McHugh replied saying
https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2015-09-22a.12&s=speaker%3A42+section%3Awrans#g13.q

During the dissemination phase of eircodes, Amárach, an independent body, conducted two parallel surveys, a face-to-face survey of 1,200 households and 200 business premises. The results of the surveys showed that 89% of the public knew the eircode for their address.

which is amazing, mine is around somewhere but I didn't learn it off

the Times (behind a paywall) has surmised that the question was just can you find out your Eircode? and this somehow got mangled into a bigger claim in answering the PQ

Yesterday, the Department of Communications and Amarach both refused to release the data. Amarach said that it could not reveal the exact question asked or if people were allowed to look up their eircode before answering.

Amarach won't release the details of the survey till end of October

plodder

It would be surprising enough that a survey would say that, but for the claim to be actually true is completely incredible.

Carawaystick

This is obviously a lie. It is untrue, and they must know it to be untrue.
There is no way to extrapolate from a survey of households to state that the public know.
21% of the population is 14 or under, I doubt the majority of them know their eircode for example, which you'ld need to have only 11% of the public not knowing their eircode.

ukoda

Carawaystick wrote: »

This is obviously a lie. It is untrue, and they must know it to be untrue.
There is no way to extrapolate from a survey of households to state that the public know.
21% of the population is 14 or under, I doubt the majority of them know their eircode for example, which you'ld need to have only 11% of the public not knowing their eircode.

I wouldn't go so far as to make the extraordinary claim it's a lie.

I would imagine the question asked was something like... "do you know what eircode is and that your house has one" easy to see that getting 89% yes

I doubt they asked "can you tell me your eircode off by heart"


There's a big difference between:

Do you know what your eircode is? (Yes of course it's my postcode and its on my fridge)

And

Can you tell me your eircode now? (Em it's AB1 T...D? Em I'd have to check again, I've it written down)

plodder

Twisting a survey question to mean something different is pretty misleading though and it's considered (very) bad form to provide misleading answers to PQ's in the Dail.

ukoda

plodder wrote: »

Twisting a survey question to mean something different is pretty misleading though and it's considered (very) bad form to provide misleading answers to PQ's in the Dail.

Woah woah woah. That's NOT what I said. I'm just making the point we don't know what was asked yet as the survey hasn't been published.

I swear the smallest little thing and it's taken by people on here and turned into a conspiracy theory clouded in lies corruption etc etc

So yeah what are people wildly concluding now?
Government mangled the data to look good?
The research company were given a back hander to "twist" the questions?
The research company were only allowed target drunk people after 4am?
Maybe the research company actually work for eircode?! That's another one of the favourite claims on here

I swear it's a joke what some people will jump to with nothing more than a few lines in an opinion piece.

a65b2cd

expectationlost wrote: »

https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2015-09-22a.12&s=speaker%3A42+section%3Awrans#g13.q

Some interesting extracts from various Parliamentary Questions, from 22nd September, published on the Kildare street website. The response on the addresses in Irish shows that the introduction of Eircode will indirectly result in improvements to GeoDirectory.

… Total spend to date on the Postcodes project amounts to €17.54m (including VAT). This is broken down between payments of €15.34m (including VAT) to Capita Business Support Services Ireland Limited to develop and roll out the National Postcode System. In addition, programme expenditure on the project has amounted to €2.2m (including VAT) since 2006.

… In accordance with the contract for the development and maintenance of eircodes, my Department has put in place reporting structures with the contractor which will, inter alia, include information on the commercial use of the Eircode system

… The provision of Irish language addresses in the Eircode Database is solely derived from the GeoDirectory database. GeoDirectory aims to include the verified official Irish translations of addresses within the database where available, using translations from an Brainse Logainmneacha and Ordnance Survey Ireland. GeoDirectory and An Brainse Logainmneacha are currently exchanging English and Irish postal address data to identify any issues and discrepancies that may exist between the databases. This analysis will facilitate the provision of existing up-to-date official Irish translations for postal addresses in the GeoDirectory database that will be made available in the Eircode Database.

MBSnr

ukoda wrote: »

Woah woah woah. That's NOT what I said. I'm just making the point we don't know what was asked yet as the survey hasn't been published.

I swear the smallest little thing and it's taken by people on here and turned into a conspiracy theory clouded in lies corruption etc etc

So yeah what are people wildly concluding now?
Government mangled the data to look good?
The research company were given a back hander to "twist" the questions?
The research company were only allowed target drunk people after 4am?
Maybe the research company actually work for eircode?! That's another one of the favourite claims on here

I swear it's a joke what some people will jump to with nothing more than a few lines in an opinion piece.

In all fairness Joe McHugh said

"The results of the surveys showed that 89% of the public knew the eircode for their address."

I do call BS on that. No way. Most people I speak to are aware of Eircode but they haven't a notion of their actual Eircode. Nor is it written down some place. They got a thing in the post, it was at the time (and still is) largely useless to them and it was filed in a 'drawer' or elsewhere. Our HR dept. got the Eircode - no official email out saying change your email signature to reflect our new postcode. Our Finance dept still sends out invoices and PO's without the code. It has been pretty much ignored. I don't think my company is unique on this.

Carawaystick

ukoda wrote: »

Woah woah woah. That's NOT what I said. I'm just making the point we don't know what was asked yet as the survey hasn't been published.

We do know from kildarestreet.com what the junior minister said in response to a pq. As I've pointed out 21% of the "public" are Under 14
The junior minister said 11% of the public don't know their eircode.

GJG

MBSnr wrote: »

In all fairness Joe McHugh said

"The results of the surveys showed that 89% of the public knew the eircode for their address."

I do call BS on that. No way. Most people I speak to are aware of Eircode but they haven't a notion of their actual Eircode.

I suspect there is some slippy language in there alright. Note that the claim isn't 'know by heart'. I know my bank account number, but I don't know it by heart.

MBSnr wrote: »

Our HR dept. got the Eircode - no official email out saying change your email signature to reflect our new postcode. Our Finance dept still sends out invoices and PO's without the code. It has been pretty much ignored. I don't think my company is unique on this.

Evidence is otherwise.

GJG wrote: »

• Search for the exact string “Dublin D01”
• Search for the exact string “Dublin D02”
  

The two Eircode results, between them, as of my searches, give 858 and 2,870 results.

The total then, one month after launch was 3,728. The same searches today, less than eight weeks later give a total of 13,360 results. Of course public adoption will drive business adoption and vice versa, so they have to get to a critical mass, but that looks like a fair old rate of increase.

a65b2cd

Carawaystick wrote: »

We do know from kildarestreet.com what the junior minister said in response to a pq. As I've pointed out 21% of the "public" are Under 14
The junior minister said 11% of the public don't know their eircode.

This is the relevant paragraph from the PQ reply:

During the dissemination phase of eircodes, Amárach, an independent body, conducted two parallel surveys, a face-to-face survey of 1,200 households and 200 business premises. The results of the surveys showed that 89% of the public knew the eircode for their address.

So a household survey and a survey of businesses. Do you really think they interviewed children? The survey was conducted during the dissemination which means during July.

Sam Russell

I see An Post do not use Eircode as I have suspected.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/eircode-and-postal-deliveries-1.2366760

ukoda

Sam Russell wrote: »

I see An Post do not use Eircode as I have suspected.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/eircode-and-postal-deliveries-1.2366760

That's a sample of 1..

There's been other examples widely shared on Twitter of post getting delivered with just an eircode, in fact, several journalists tried it and got their mail delivered

An Post never said ericode could be used as a substitute for writing a ****e address on mail. They always said they want your full postal address plus your eircode.

No one at any stage claimed eircode could and should be used on its own without a full address.

From a quick search of Twitter:
Here's a link to a tweet of a user saying their letter was delivered when the address was wrong but eircode correct

https://twitter.com/carrigman/status/625569093370933248


So can I now claim that An Post do use it? As you seem to think you can claim from one example that they don't ? So I'm going to go ahead and claim from 1 example that they do indeed use it