No charge to households for use of new Eircode postcodes

Households will not have to change their address or face mandatory charges when the new postcode system is introduced next May, TDs and Senators have been told.

Eircode, the Republic’s new postcode system, will cost the Government about €27million, but households will not have to pay additional charges and small businesses can have access to the Eircode database for as little as about €10 per month.

In some cases use of the Eircode will be free - for example when a person inputs a postcode they already know into a vehicle’s satellite navigation system.

Freight forwarders are to be charged for access to the Eircode database, but costs to the industry would not be anything like a reported €80 million, backers of the system have told the Oireachtas Committee on Transport and Communications.

Public servant Eamonn Molloy, who was tasked with procuring the new postcodes, told committee chairman John O’Mahoney that claims by freight handlers that participation in the Eircode system could cost them up to €80 million were wrong.

“It is not going to be of that order, he said.

Mr Molloy, an assistant secretary general of the Department of Communications, said the lack of a postcode was affecting on the State’s competitiveness, adding to the cost of doing business here.

‘Fully committed’

Liam O'Sullivan, mails operations director with An Post, said the postal service was fully committed to the new system, but that it would not be mandatory for people to add the post code to letters.

An Post will continue to deliver letters without the codes.

Liam Duggan of technology firm Capita, which was awarded the contract to roll out the new code, said charges for freight companies to have access to the Eircode database would be significantly lower than had been reported.

He said the advice for many small businesses with clients numbering less than 100 was to ask the clients directly for their new postcode. The code would work in a vehicles GPS system and therefore result in no payments to Capita, he said.

For many small businesses with larger numbers of clients, he said access to the database may be had in two ways - either payment by the number of users of the database in a company, or by payment of “a few cents” every time a postcode was required.

This latter method would typically cost such companies with about 100 clients “about €10 per month”, he said.

Mr Duggan said there were a number of ways to pay for regional access or for access to the entire database of 2.2 million addresses, which he said would be only required by very large companies.

These companies would have to work out their own cost benefit analysis to see if access to the data bases was of value to them.