Budget hopes for an Irish Postcode

With hopes that this week’s Budget in Ireland will include funding for Ireland’s long-awaited post code project, Nightline chief executive John Tuohy is confident it will finally happen For a country which has spent the last few years mired in a grave financial crisis, one could be forgiven for regarding each successive Budget with resignation rather than rejoicing.

However, the package of measures being introduced by Finance Minister Michael Noonan this week is widely expected to contain something to provide a little something to cheer the soul in this bleak financial and meteorological midwinter.

After lots of debate and no little delay, Ireland is set to finally have its own system of postcodes.

To readers in the UK, Europe and much further afield, it may seem odd that a modern, developed country might not already have system in place which doesn’t leave postmen or courier drivers scratching their heads while trying to find exact destinations for mail and parcels.

Yet those without a little local knowledge have found themselves in just such a situation up to now.

There are nay-sayers who still can’t bring themselves to believe that postcodes may be upon us. Even in the last few weeks, they have suggested that the pot of money apparently set aside for the implementation of the postcode project would be plundered to meet other of Ireland’s economic needs.

Certainly, were that to happen, the cause of postmen, parcel carriers and consumers would undoubtedly be set back. In the current climate, businesses in our sector and others are eager to make themselves even more efficient. Without postcodes, deliveries would simply take longer.

Also, the push by the European Commission to ensure the full liberalisation of domestic postal operations would be set back even further. In Ireland, one of a clutch of countries ordered to open up its internal postal network in 2011, we still await an agreement on the details of so-called Downstream Access (DSA) – the ability to use An Post’s existing infrastructure to make final mile deliveries.

Any agreement and implementation of DSA would be more difficult to bring about and take more time to implement if postcodes remained out of reach.

Under pressure

Given the havoc which the recession has wrought on Ireland in recent years, it might be tempting to doubt whether positive developments will actually come to fruition but I, for one, though, don’t count myself as a sceptic.

In this case, I think postcodes will happen and not just because delivery firms want it to. The Taoiseach is under pressure to demonstrate to the European powers who bailed us out in late 2010 that he runs an organised administration, capable of doing things like collecting taxes.

A new local property tax and the advent of water metering both require postcodes to make them work properly.

So, even though we may not be uppermost in the minds of those who will finally propel postcodes into operation, parcel carriers like Nightline stand to be among the beneficiaries and that’s absolutely fine by me.

Sure enough, it won’t be totally simple. Legal action regarding the tendering process for possibly rolling out the postcode system is currently unresolved and there may well be other obstacles to follow.

Knowing that there will eventually be a coding method able to identify individual Irish residential and business addresses far quicker than ever before will be a significant step forward for many different branches of commerce and public administration.

If there is something called a postcode lottery, Ireland will finally have hit the jackpot!

John Tuohy is the chief executive officer and managing director of Irish parcel carrier Nightline, co-founding the company with David Field back in 1992. The firm now handles one in four of all parcels on Irish roads.