Sir, – Nothing encapsulates the awful level of Irish policy discourse like Eircode.
Rather than an objective analysis of the pros and cons, the “debate” is dominated by a series of illogical, contradictory and inaccurate tirades from individuals and vested interests who refuse to consider the bigger picture or long-term benefits.
First and most importantly it is never acknowledged that the only way to bring about a near-hierarchical addressing system would be to allocate road or route numbers to every single non-unique address in the country.
As most roads traverse more than one townland and most townlands contain more than one road, the traditional townland line will not fit properly into these new addresses. Space would have to be reserved for new buildings, resulting in address such as “J Murphy, No 3001 L3867, Ballymagash”.
Do your correspondents really think this would be a significant improvement over the Eircode system? Given the vast resources (dwarfing the Eircode outlay) that would be required to assign route numbers to every highway and byway, mansion and cottage in the country, it would need to be.
Eircode features code redundancy and checking so that a emergency telephone operator immediately sees if an Eircode is valid or if a character is incorrect.
That is not the case with regular street numbers or a GPS system; therefore Gerard Bennett's advice (January 11th) that readers should avoid Eircode (presumably in favour of manual directions) is truly baffling, if not dangerous.
The Eircode website features an excellent mapping system that can link to a mobile phone’s mapping app. Offline maps from the leading manufacturers will soon be available and will work in areas with no mobile phone reception. This will be an enormous boon to the emergency services and lost tourists.
If adopted by Government and the public service, the new unique addresses have the potential to reduce fraud, waste and errors in many services and in revenue collection and disbursement. As a law-abiding and tax-compliant citizen, I would certainly welcome this.
I also look forward to the day when I can send birthday gifts to my niece without a courier telephoning me to request turn-by-turn directions. – Yours, etc,
MATTHEW GLOVER,
Lucan,
Co Dublin.