I am also very concerned about confusion between the letters when written and pronounced.

I agree that there should be a facility to ultimately break down to the nearest house, along the lines of county (first two digits) electoral division (digits 3, 4 and 5), street or road segment (digits 6 and 7) and individual house (digits 8 and 9). But there is no need to break down to that level at the very beginning.

There are plenty of problems with letters in codes. From the evidence I am aware of, they aren’t really any more memorable – they just seem more memorable – . You are more likely to make mistakes and misremember when there are letters, especially similar sounding letters, compared to numbers.

There is a paper on this topic by Hull in Ergonomics (A comparative evaluation of human performance with some numeric, alpha and alpha – numeric coding systems., 1975, Vol 18)

Very few countries actually use letters in their postcodes, apparently for this reason.

D Dublin
C Cork
FG County Fingal (not supported by a’D'postcode, eg Swords, Malahide, Portmarnock, Skerries)
BY Bray, Greystones, North county Wicklow
LK Limerick
GW Galway
KK Kilkenny
WT Waterford
LG Longford
DK Dundalk
DO Drogheda
WK Wicklow
etc…..you get the jist

They use this when printing the barcode on the mail item so that it can be effectively ‘walk-sorted’.

So, it might be worth considering a lower-level granularity than the current postcode in use in the UK. Royal Mail has determined that it’s not quite fit for all purposes….

I am sure this point has been made elsewhere, but an alphanumeric code does have the advantage that you can more easily remember the code, I believe, as the codes are derived from the post-town, whereas pure numeric codes are less intuitive…unless you’re in France of course, where (I think) the code starts with the Departement number….

I would say that, what this tells us, if anything, is that the Irish post code should be appropriate for Ireland, and picking a system which suits another country, whichever it is, would be a poor compromise, and an unsuitable system will just be ignored.

Niall, referring to your nordic solution – this system could not work in Ireland because we already have non unique addressing so that the “Lake Road” you quote could appear several times in one area causing even more confusion – plus a directional element would also need to be added.

The National grid system of any country is the best way to define any location – just reduce the number of characters to a manageable 7 alphnumeric characters – and you have PON Codes as available for any location in Ireland – North and South – at http://www.irishpostcodes.ie

I still propose something similar to the vehicle county registration preambles like D for Dublin, C for Cork, and so on.

Finland applies an interesting method to rural residential post addresses; the street name + the number of metres from the nearest junction; thus a house 970 metres from junction X on, say, Lake Road, will be numbers Lake Road 97, and the next house 1.5 km from the junction will be numbered Lake Road 150, and so on. I think this is how it is done in the Nordic countries generally.

How ever it is to be done, the main objective for this should be that the postal address ALWAYS STAYS THE SAME no matter who lives there over the years, decades, generations.

Just read your blog on postcodes. We need a standard numeric system like in a normal modern European country. Buy something from the internet you need a postcode. I make one up! embarrasing for me and indeed Ireland inc. I sometimes use my old German one; 69181. The 6 is The Frankfurt postal area. 9 is the southern sub postal district and the 181 relates to our town and post route. I don’t know how old the system is, but it is indeed very old and is used by many other companies and organizations then the Bundespost. The Bundespost did not lose out, but in fact profited from postcodes and has become today the largest European logistics company.

Actually I think An Post is not the problem here, rather it is with our planning authorities. When they grant planning permission for a house they do not assign the building a propper street name or house number. This means we do not have the basic requirements of an addressing system which are the street name and house number.
Why this is still the case I do not know, but I do know we suffered from a brown envelope culture in the past and this could have made life for the developer and planner easier were they to circumvent the few rules we had.

Rgds,

Gary