This is a recent article from The Irish Times, printed on Dec 24th 2015, about the mindblowingly useless Eircode postcode implemented in Ireland during the summer of 2015.
The pattern has become all too familiar. An Irish government rolls out a system which has been very poorly designed despite having gone through an incredibly expensive consultation process. The concerns of Irish people and Irish businesses who would most benefit from a well-designed system have been ignored. When are we going to learn from our regular national failings?
Two quotes in the piece from Verona Murphy and Neil McDonnell sum up the feeling in the transport industry :
Neil McDonnell, general manager of the Freight Transport Association of Ireland, whose members include the global delivery firms DHL and FedEx, says that as far as he knows, none of the association’s members is using the code. “The nature of a postcode as a random code is the significant problem. It is essentially a social security number for a property,” says McDonnell. “The code itself is a meaningless construct.”
Describing it as “worthless”, Irish Road Haulage Association’s president Verona Murphy says it was designed “as a system that only An Post could use” and it is “useless” for anyone else. “There was no input from those whom it’s supposed to service.”