Sun 7 Nov 2004
A few months ago I publsihed an article about postcodes in Ireland. (Ireland is the last country in the European Union that doesn’t have a postcode). That work is still proceeding.
I’ve been working and consulting with a small group of people and we’ve come up with some draft ‘principles’ for a postcode system that would provide unambiguous addresses. We’re still in the stage of preliminary consultations on the topic and so I don’t want to say too much in public, but if you have any contacts in the shipping/logistics, utilities, direct marketing or other relevant industries that might like to have an input, let me know.
November 29th, 2004 at 3:06 pm
With reference to your write-up about postcodes
I am curious to know how UK firms (Direct Mail for example) sort their data for Ireland. I have been informed that the only way of doing this is to match the Irish county to it’s local airport. Is this correct and if so what logic drives that mapping if there are not postcodes to base it on. Please can you explain this for me.
Many thanks
December 2nd, 2004 at 12:08 am
Well, you can sort them by County. That’s about it really, without the use of proprietary databases of placenames.
I wouldn’t see much point in doing the thing with the airport codes. All mail is sorted centrally for the whole country. The vast majority of air freight comes in through one or maybe two airports.
Let me know if I can help you more with this sort of problem.