Eircodes are like Brexit, if you can't turn back the clock you might as well lean in to the New Order. When Eircode was created, at vast expense, An Post def'n'y had its thumb on the scale. I've expressed a lot of interest in the roll-out and its implementation 2015 - 2017 - 2018+WhatThreeWords - 2019 - 2020+UPS.
The rule for us is that our local post-sorting HQ is in another county. IF we pretend it's still 2014 and have Co Carlow as the last line of our postal address THEN regardless of the Eircode, mail-sorters send the post to, like, Carlow. Someone there will scratch out Co Carlow and add ↑KILKENNY↑ with real scraggy hand-writing and it will get to us a day late. Happens on the reg'lar. And usually it don't matter a damn because any comms which are time sensitive will come to us by email or txt. And like everyone else almost all of our post is bills and circulars with a blip of phatic cards for bdays and Christmas.
Recipients certainly, and senders possibly, have no control of which, of many competing, outfit makes the final mile delivery. AnPost for example takes up the slack (at less than market rates b/c bulk discount) p.p. Amazon for deliveries to the Irish boondocks. But many carriers have gone on-line to some extent, so that you can track your parcel as it whooshes past en route to the wrong depot. I used Bookshops.org a tuthree weeks ago to send reading matter to the Gdaus in England. I received three (3) emails [L] over 48 hours counting down the km/hrs to successful delivery. For birthday flowers and chocolate at the end of last year "Successful delivery" for us was feck 'em in that shed: they're sure to find it. I was ragin' that the chocolate was weeping condensation when we finally found it four days later - but the web-florist did refund the cost.
We were expecting a parcel of bingly-bongly bells from Plum Village.They were in the UPS system on-line but were clearly not reaching the destination (we checked all the sheds, including those without roofs). One issue is that, having invested m€ga$ in an on-line tracking system, many carriers dispense with all but two of their customer service agents. Their names are Krishna and Samira and they live in Bengaluru. If something goes wrong outside of the FAQ, the unhappy unrecipient has to hear A Lot of cycles of Greensleeves before Samira picks up.
finally I met a new UPS deliveroo, who wasn't having any of my, or Eircode's, guff. For their parallel delivaverse Co Carlow is, and always has been, Co Carlow; and it's served by the regional UPS depot in Finglas Co Dublin. Kilkenny addresses are served from their Waterford depot. Deliveries to the scut end of Carlow are almost guaranteed to be 1-2 days later than they should, because Eircodes are not consonant with the historical counties.
Anyway, back to Eircodes: here's a defintive map of how AnPost wants their counties to be. Monochrome GoogleMap version. Zoom in to SunnySE (so sorry, Samira: this pic is a bandwidth-sucking 200kb). It looks like a 19thC map of Germany with a rash of independent margravates, kingdoms, bishoprics and duchies all with their own domains. A piddling back-water like Bagenalstown gets parity of esteem with the cities of Kilkenny R95 and Waterford X91 - must be the railway station gives B'town R21 hub-status.
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