A postal address in Ireland is a place of delivery defined by Irish Standard (IS) EN 14142-1:2011 ("Postal services. Address databases") and serviced by the universal service provider, . Its addressing guides comply with the guidelines of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), the United Nations-affiliated body responsible for promoting standards in the postal industry, across the world.Eircode Address Database Product Guide Edition 2 Version 4

In Ireland, 35% of premises (over 600,000) have non-unique addresses due to an absence of house numbers or names.Eircodes are on the way to all addresses in Ireland, Department of Communications, Climate Change and Natural Resources Before the introduction of a national postcode system (Eircode) in 2015, this required postal workers to remember which family names corresponded to which house in smaller towns, and many townlands. , An Post encourages customers to use Eircode because it ensures that their post person can pinpoint the exact location.

Ireland was the last country in the OECD to create a postcode system. In July 2015 all 2.2 million residential and business addresses in Ireland received a letter notifying them of the new Eircode for their address. Unlike other countries, where postcodes define clusters or groups of addresses, an Eircode identifies an individual address and shows exactly where it is located. The system was criticised at its launch.

Responsibility for the current postal delivery system rests with An Post, a semi-state body; however, the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (DCENR) retains the right to regulate addresses if they wish so.

Pre-Eircode postal districts

Dublin

In Dublin city and its suburbs, a system of postal districts was introduced in 1917 by the Royal Mail with the prefix "D", and retained after Ireland became an independent country, without the prefix. However the use of district numbers by the public did not begin until 1961,, The Irish Independent, retrieved 26 September 2009 when street signs displayed postal district numbers. Prior to that time, street signs only displayed the street name in Irish and English.

The Dublin system had 22 districts – Dublin 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6W, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24. These were incorporated into the routing keys used by the Eircode national postcode system as D01, D02, D12, D22, etc.

Cork

The city of Cork had four numbered postal districts, but these were used internally by An Post and rarely on mail. Cork 1 covered the city centre and large parts of the surrounding city, so, for example, the "Patrick Street" () sign displays the digit '1'. Cork 2, administered from the Ballinlough sorting office, covered the south-east, Cork 3 (from Gurranabraher) covered the north-west while Cork 4 (from Togher sorting office) covered the south-west. The numbers are not used in the Eircode system, with routing keys in the Cork area instead beginning with the letter 'T'.

Eircode

The launch of a national postcode system called Eircode () began on 28 April 2014. The system incorporates the existing numbered Dublin postal districts as part of the routing key. Eircode provides a unique postcode for each address.

The codes, known as Eircodes, consist of seven characters. The first three characters, called the routing key, are designed to benefit the postal and logistics industry and contain on average 15,000 addresses each. The Routing Key is used to help sort mail; it is the principal post town of the address as defined by . The second part of the Eircode, called the unique identifier, consists of four characters drawn from a set of randomised letters and numbers that identify each individual address. They are stored in a central database, Eircode Address Database (ECAD), along with other useful geographic information including addresses, variants/aliases, and geo-coordinates of each address point. Sample product data and pricing details were issued to businesses in March 2015. The ECAD is now available to license by end-users and value-added resellers called Eircode Providers.

An example of a typical Irish address is that of the Lord Mayor of Dublin: The Eircode is added on as an extra line to the existing address and postal district code which remains unchanged.What will get an Eircode?

Dublin City Council Lord Mayor's Office Mansion House Dawson Street Dublin 2 D02 AF30

Unlike other postcode systems, Eircode is not used for PO Box addresses.Is there an Eircode associated with PO Box numbers? No, Eircodes are not being allocated to PO Box numbers at this time.

Background An Post did not introduce automated sorting machines until the 1990s. By then, the optical character recognition (OCR) systems were advanced enough to read whole addresses, as opposed to just postcodes, thereby allowing An Post to skip a generation. Consequently, mail to addresses in the rest of the state did not require any digits after the address.

While An Post stated that the addressing system and sorting technologies make postcodes for mail delivery unnecessary, it was suggested that other services (such as advertising mail providers) would benefit from a national system. After considerable delays, it was announced on 8 October 2013 that codes would be introduced by early 2015. A ten-year contract to introduce and implement the postcode system was awarded to Capita Business Support Services Ireland in January 2014 with support from BearingPoint, Autoaddress, and Strand Communications.

Introduction of a national system In 2005, it became the policy of the government of Ireland to introduce a national scheme of postcodes. In May 2005, Noel Dempsey, Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, announced that postcodes would be introduced by 1 January 2008. In his 2005 book, The Pope's Children, economist David McWilliams hypothesised that the reason post codes were being introduced in Ireland was to prevent political canvassers from getting lost within housing estates:

Noel Dempsey's successor as minister, Eamon Ryan, announced in August 2007 that he was delaying the project pending additional consultation and investigation into the need. On 24 February 2008, The Sunday Times reported that Ryan was finalising the system and hoped to bring the plans to cabinet before the summer of 2008, for introduction in 2009.The Sunday Times (Irish Edition) 24 February 2008 p 3 —Ryan zeroes in on Dublin 4 by Stephen O'Brien

was quoted as saying "it would be at the heart of the introduction" and the report of PA Consultants indicated that should be paid over €27 million for its involvement.

Following further delays, in September 2009, the cabinet agreed to go ahead with the project. It was to be put out to tender with the end of 2011 given as the date by which postcodes should be assigned.DCENR Press Release 31 Jan 2010 In January 2010, Minister Ryan stated in the that the exact nature of the code would not be decided until the implementation tender process had been completed but that a Location Code with GPS coordinates should be part of the system implemented. On 29 January 2010, a tender was issued to select consultants to assist the Minister for Communications in deciding on the way forward.

The project was again delayed, but in December 2010, the government agreed to seek tenders for procurement of national postcodes, with an estimated cost of €15 million, with the contract to be awarded in the summer of 2011, with the codes introduced by the end of that year.

On 29 June 2013, The Irish Times reported that the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Pat Rabbitte, was to bring details to the cabinet meeting of 2 July. According to the report, a postcode operator was to be appointed by September 2013 and every householder and business was to be issued a code by July 2014. Following a cabinet meeting on 8 October 2013, Rabbitte announced that a unique seven-character code would be assigned to every postal delivery point ("letterbox") in the state. A consortium led by Capita Ireland was awarded the tender to develop, implement and operate the system, costing €27 million.

Language concerns Conradh na Gaeilge, an organisation advocating use of the Irish language, expressed concern over postcodes or postal abbreviations being based solely on English language place names, for example D for Dublin ( in Irish) or WX for Wexford ( in Irish) as is the case with vehicle registration plates. It had advocated that postcodes should either consist solely of numbers, as in many other bilingual or multilingual countries, or be based on Irish language names instead.Irish postcodes should be Irish-based, says , , 11 November 2008 These concerns were addressed upon the introduction of Eircode. Apart from routing keys corresponding to the previous Dublin postal districts, the initial letters of Eircode routing keys bear no relation to either the English language or Irish language place names within these areas. However, they do incorporate the letters K, V, W, X, Y which are not used in Irish orthography apart from a small number of loanwords.

Preparation for a postcode In the light of the liberalisation of postal services and the end of 's monopoly, ComReg, the Communications Regulator in Ireland, began considering the introduction of postcodes. A Postcode Working Group met in early 2005 and produced a reportAn examination of the issues in relation to the introduction of a postcode in Ireland ; report of the Postcode Working Group (MS Word doc) recommending the implementation of a postcode system.

On 23 May 2005, the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Noel Dempsey, in a government press release announced that postcodes would be introduced in Ireland by 1 January 2008. In November 2005, the National Statistics Board issued a report welcoming the decision and making recommendations as to its implementation. They supported a point-based postcode system that used grid reference/GPS technology to provide a relatively clear-cut, low cost approach to allocating a postcode to an address. This avoids trying to group households together into small area clusters. It was later announced that the postcodes would include the one- or two-character county codes currently used in vehicle registration plates, making them alphanumeric, with the existing Dublin system retained.

In June 2007, a briefIntroductory Brief for Mr. Eamonn Ryan T.D. (PDF, 3 MB) Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, 15 June 2007 to the new Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan, stated that a memo was submitted by the Department of Communications to the Irish Government in May 2007 seeking approval for the implementation of the postcode system. It also stated that the decision arising from this submission was that the Minister would revert to Government following further analysis to quantify the benefits, which would then be followed by a public consultation process. In August 2007, the Minister reportedly postponed the implementation of the system "indefinitely" pending additional public consultation.

On 18 October 2007 Eamon Ryan announced at ComReg's "Postal Services in the 21st Century" conference that "[Post] codes should be introduced as a matter of priority". The introduction was stated to be subject to cabinet approval. On 25 February 2008 the Irish Independent reported that the proposals were being presented to the Cabinet with a view to full national implementation before summer 2008. It stated that Eamon Ryan was finalising the proposals, which include a 6 character format postcode, giving a sample of D04 123 where D04 corresponded to the current Dublin 4 postal region and 123 was a specific group of buildings. similar to British and Dutch postcodes, which cover groups of buildings, rather than simply suburbs or towns.