Around early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes.
IIRC, we were going to implement UK style postcodes much earlier but the OCR machines that an post had were good enough to read the whole address reliably by the time they got around to considering it. So they deemed it unnecessary.
> Around early 2015. Before then it was annoying to fill out online forms with addresses, because you had to guess the right way to say no-postcode. I still get letters to this day with "None." written where the postcode goes.
Oh yes I know. Many many websites used a "validator" for a postcode for Ireland so in many cases just putting "None" would not be accepted. You had to enter random stuff to see what format was accepted. Often they accepted UK-style postcodes or just numbers.
I think part of the reason was anticompetitive though. In the smaller village in Ireland the postman would know the address of each person, but a courier like DHL or TNT would not. I used to work at customer service for a company doing RMAs and I'd often get calls from exhausted couriers trying to find a customer.
IIRC, we were going to implement UK style postcodes much earlier but the OCR machines that an post had were good enough to read the whole address reliably by the time they got around to considering it. So they deemed it unnecessary.