An Post Resists Pressure for Postal Zip Code

Historians have joined forces with An Post to resist pressure to introduce US and European-style zip codes here. Prof Ruairi O hUiginn, a lecturer at the department of Modern Irish in NUI, Maynooth, told a symposium on the issue that place names were an important part of Irish life which often dated back to Celtic Ireland and our earliest literature. And An Post added that it did not believe that Irish people would be willing to use the codes. Prof O hUiginn warned that if post codes were introduced they must not allow the country to be “vandalised” by the move such as happened in Northern Ireland. “In rural Ireland there are over 62,000 townland names containing parts of our natural, societal, political and linguistic history,” said Prof O hUiginn, “There is great fascination out there in place names, where they come from and what their meaning is.” The commercial director of An Post, Derek Kickham, told the symposium that while the postal code system would have been valuable if it had been introduced in the ’60s, the technology An Post now had in place meant the system would not be economically justified. Mr Kickham said that while the system was introduced to Dublin 6 in 1985, many people there still refused to use it. “I wouldn’t believe that the Irish psyche is one that is easily going to allow the introduction of the postal codes. And compliance is a fundamental issue,” he said. Prof O hUiginn added that despite the usefulness of codes people were not always happy with their use. “Codes and numbers are often referred to disparagingly by people unhappy with their use. ‘I feel I’m just a number’ or ‘We’re just statistics’ are phrases used by people unhappy with the impersonality pervading through the country,” he added. Speaking at the symposium, Paul Mallon of ESB joined the Economic and Social Research Institute, and International Express Couriers in calling for the establishment of postal codes. Mr Mallon said this would be especially important for interaction with customers and for locating premises in an emergency. Brendan Whelan, director of ESRI, said the institute favoured postal codes because of their research value in areas such as economics, health and planning. Etain Doyle, chairwoman of ComReg – the group which ran the symposium – agreed that it was important that postal codes were not foisted on the people.