How revealing - Ignoring Eircode

It might be easy to joke about the low use, below 5%, of the €38m Eircode but, as is often the case, the joke is really on us.

Designed to make our postal system more efficient — and to help emergency services, couriers, and taxi drivers find out-of-the-way addresses — it seemed an entirely worthwhile project that might make a contribution towards making our lives a little less fraught, but we have not used it. Indeed, many people do not even know their own postcode.

We are not alone in our indifference. An Post has admitted that its manual sortation system does not use the postcode but that its automated one does. The issue is fuelling a row over evidence give to an Oireachtas committee about Eircode plans and how they were implemented.

Just last week a multi-million euro plan to try to save rural post offices was launched. This may delay changes that communications technology seems to make inevitable. Is it possible that, by ignoring Eircode, we show in the most undeniable way that, in an age of online everything, the traditional model postal communications is all but obsolete?