First… more progress on settling-in
My TransferWise PIN-and-chip debit card arrived in the mail over the weekend, so I’m psyched about that, although I haven’t used it for an in-person live transaction yet. I also received some new linens I ordered on Amazon.co.uk, including a fitted sheet deep enough to accommodate the mattress memory foam topper I had previously ordered and received. After setting that up last night, and with the addition of a flat/top sheet between me and the duvet, the bed feels much more like home now. It has also gotten chillier here, with nighttime lows down in the mid-40s F, so I’ve had to figure out how to work the control panels on the electric radiators… thank the gods for Google and YouTube!
Postal codes in Ireland: Eircodes
The rabbit hole I found myself going down for today’s post is all about Ireland’s postal codes known as Eircodes (the equivalent of zip codes in the U.S.). Up until now I didn’t really put any thought into the Eircode that was part of my address – I just assumed it worked like a zip code. However, something my landlord said during the whole Vodafone internet/modem delivery saga stuck in my mind… I asked him if perhaps they couldn’t find the address, but he said no they have the Eircode so they have no excuses. Huh.
A couple of mind-blowing facts:
- Ireland did not have country-wide postal codes until 2015 and was the last country in the OECD to get them (see below for what OECD is).
- The introduction of the Eircode system in 2015 made Ireland the first country in the world to have a unique postal code for each address.
- Dublin’s postal code system was first implemented by the British in 1917 and later retained by the Irish government. Dublin’s postal codes grew over the years and are now numbered D01 to D24 (odd-numbers are located to the north of the River Liffey, while even-numbered codes are to the south). Dublin’s codes were incorporated into the new Eircodes and are still used to refer to different parts of town, so I’m trying to learn them.
- Over 35% of street addresses in Ireland are non-unique, where there is no house name or number. For example, the address of my apartment building is denoted just as “Sprangers Yard, Crow Street” without any house/building number. Also, people in Ireland can spell the same addresses differently, or use either an English or Irish version of an address. That meant that prior to the implementation of Eircodes, the national postal service, called “An Post” (which is Irish for “The Post”), had to sort mail using multiple variations of an address.
In short, Ireland was way behind the times but then seems to have leap frogged ahead of everyone else.
Each Eircode is a unique 7-character code consisting of letters and numbers. You don’t share Eircodes with your neighbors or anyone else, it’s specific to your unique mailing address. For example, my Eircode is D02 P718, so if you type that into the Eircode database (https://finder.eircode.ie/), it immediately returns the result of “21 Sprangers Yard, Crow Street, Dublin 2” — even down to the apartment #! However, unique Eircodes are not assigned to post office boxes.
The routing key is the first 3 characters of an Eircode. The first character is always a letter, followed by 2 numbers (except for D6W which is a special case for one of Dublin’s old postal codes). The letters are not linked to a county or city name, except for postal districts in Dublin, which have had their existing postal codes transferred into a routing key format such as D03, D12 and D22. The same routing key can be shared by several towns and townlands. There are 139 routing keys in Ireland, which is five times more detailed than the 26 counties.
The second segment of an Eircode is a unique identifier consisting of 4 alpha-numeric characters. As its name suggests, each unique identifier is unique to each mailing address within a routing key area and is not issued in any particular sequence (i.e., my unique identifier is P718 but my neighbor’s is not +1 or P719). This is to avoid the situation where a new building is created between two existing ones, and the code sequence would be broken, requiring all Eircodes in the area to be changed. Insofar as I understand it, the unique identifiers are generated randomly. Certain letters have been left out to avoid confusion when written down (e.g., the letters “O” and “I” can be mixed up with the numbers 0 and 1). Also, certain letters that can sound like one another have been excluded to avoid confusion where clear verbal communication is critical, such as in a call centre (e.g., “M” and “N”). Furthermore, each Eircode has been designed to avoid creating offensive or sensitive words, or other recognisable terms (e.g., proper names, business names and acronyms).
For any of you math junkies out there: given the 10 possible numbers of 0-9 and 15 possible letters (excluding the problematic ones), there are 25 different possibilities for each of the 4 digits in the unique identifier segment of an Eircode, i.e., 25 x 25 x 25 x 25 = 390,625 possible permutations, which combined with each of Ireland’s 139 routing keys, means there can be more than 54 million unique Eircodes. Perhaps that’s not enough for all the addresses in the U.S., but it’s plenty for Ireland!
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
as gleaned from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OECD
OECD is an intergovernmental economic organisation with 37 member countries founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum of countries describing themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practices and coordinate domestic and international policies of its members. Although OECD does not have a power to enforce its decisions, which further require unanimous vote from its members, it is recognized as highly influential publisher of mostly economic data through publications as well as annual evaluations and rankings of members countries.
The OECD actually originated in 1948 as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) to help administer the Marshall Plan after World War II.
Map of OECD countries (original founding countries are in darker blue):
