A Valid Irish Address Example
A valid Irish address example has a property or townland line, a town line, and a last line carrying the county name followed by the Eircode — for example "Ashling, Coolroe" on the first line, "Enniscorthy" on the next, and "County Wexford Y21 F8X2" on the last. An Eircode is always seven characters, split into a three-character routing key and a four-character unique identifier, a two-part structure UPU S42 records as one of several genuinely different national approaches to how much of a postal code a single free source can realistically publish.
Fake Addresses generates the three-character routing key only, resolved to a real Local Electoral Area by testing the routing key's own point against a real administrative boundary. The four-character unique identifier that would complete a full Eircode is never generated at all, because no free Irish source publishes it: the routing key is public information, but the four characters after it are sold separately as a proprietary lookup product, and they identify one specific delivery point rather than an area. That is a sharper kind of gap than a country whose free source simply stops at street level, because the missing half of an Irish Eircode is not a street name or a house number — it is the exact reference that would otherwise complete one real, individual address.
That distinction matters directly for a QA engineer testing an Irish shipping or billing form: a Fake Addresses Irish record's routing key and resolved Local Electoral Area are both real and boundary-verified, but the record never claims to show a complete, real seven-character Eircode. Inventing the missing four characters would mean guessing at the one identifier that points to a specific home or business, which is exactly the kind of claim Fake Addresses does not make for any country in this build.
Irish Eircode Format and Examples
Fake Addresses generates an Irish Eircode routing key that is always three characters, one letter followed by two characters that can be either digits or letters, and never attaches a synthetic four-character identifier after it:
| Routing key | Area | Example full Eircode |
|---|---|---|
| D01 | Dublin 1 | D01 F5P2 |
| T12 | Cork city | T12 X2N7 |
| H91 | Galway city | H91 D3PY |
| Y21 | Enniscorthy, County Wexford | Y21 F8X2 |
How Irish Address Format Compares to the United States and Canada
Fake Addresses treats Ireland's Eircode as the most granular postal code in this three-way comparison, because it is the only one of the three built to identify a single address rather than an area shared by many:
| Country | What one postal code identifies | Postal-code position |
|---|---|---|
| Ireland | One individual address, via a seven-character Eircode split into a three-character routing key and a four-character unique identifier | End of the last line |
| United States | A block, building or delivery route shared by many addresses, via a ZIP+4, per USPS Publication 28 | End of the last line |
| Canada | At most a single building, via a six-character postal code, though the second half (the Local Delivery Unit) is a proprietary code no free source publishes | End of the last line, two spaces before the code |
Synthetic Test Data Generation for Irish Test Addresses
Synthetic test data generation for Ireland has to treat the missing four characters of the Eircode as a feature of the test, not a defect to hide. Fake Addresses treats that gap as the headline fact of the Irish page rather than a footnote, because a QA engineer validating an Irish shipping form against a real Eircode lookup service needs to know in advance that a generated record's routing key is real while nothing after it is.
Fake Addresses states its Irish coherence level plainly on the random Ireland address generator: the routing key is real and resolved to a real Local Electoral Area by point-in-polygon, while the remaining four characters and the street line are both synthesised because neither is a free, ingestable product. A QA engineer testing an Irish delivery or billing form can treat the routing key and its administrative area as the one part of a generated Irish record that a real validation service should recognise.
Every generated Irish record stays non-deliverable by construction for exactly this reason. The four characters that would complete a real Eircode are never drawn from any source, real or synthetic, so a generated Irish record can never accidentally complete into somebody's actual home or business, and an Irish test fixture built from this data carries no risk of resolving to a real delivery point, whether it is committed to a public repository or run against a live validation endpoint.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Fake Addresses generate only three characters of an Irish Eircode?
An Eircode is seven characters split into a three-character routing key and a four-character unique identifier, and only the routing key is published as a free, ingestable postal-code product. Fake Addresses generates every Irish record from the routing key alone, because the remaining four characters are a separate proprietary product that identifies one specific address rather than an area.
Does an Irish Eircode work like a UK postcode or a US ZIP code?
No, and the difference is the whole point of Ireland's system. Fake Addresses generates the three-character routing key, which behaves like the area-level part of a UK postcode or a US ZIP code — shared by many addresses. The four characters that make a full Irish Eircode point at exactly one address are never generated, because no free source publishes them.
Is the Local Electoral Area on a Fake Addresses Irish record real?
Yes. Fake Addresses resolves every generated Irish routing key to a real Local Electoral Area by testing the routing key's own point against a real administrative boundary, the same point-in-polygon method used for every other country's administrative-area tier. The street line and the rest of the Eircode remain synthesised.
Sources
- Universal Postal Union — The Universal Postal Union runs an addressing-solutions programme, including international addressing standards and assistance to member countries whose addresses do not follow a US or UK-style format.
- United States Postal Service — Postal Explorer — USPS Publication 28 defines a "standardized address" as one using official USPS abbreviations, and a "complete address" as one containing everything needed to match the ZIP+4 and City State files.