Ireland (IE) — internal licensing notes

Source research, 2026-08-29 — sellability + reproducibility audit

Clean GO, and simpler than the prior FedEx-schema research anticipated. fedex-agents-prototype/countries/IRL/research.json (researched 2026-06-12, status REVIEW, never approved) already established the core constraint: Ireland's Eircode system has two tiers, and only the coarser one is openly reusable. What that research didn't check is that GeoNames itself already ships exactly the open tier, as a single CC BY 4.0 source — no need for the gist + autoaddress.com combination that research proposed and never got licence-checked.

The constraint (established in the FedEx research, still holds)

The full per-address Eircode Address Database (ECAD, ~2.2M codes) is operated by Eircode Ltd/Capita under a state contract and requires a paid licence; bulk scraping (e.g. the public Eircode Finder) violates its terms. Only the 139 3-character routing keys (e.g. D02 → "Dublin 2") are openly reusable — this is not a choice made for this build, it's the actual boundary of what's legally available.

The source — GeoNames IE (verified 2026-08-29, not just assumed from the readme note)

https://download.geonames.org/export/zip/IE.zip      # 3.7 KB, 139 rows

GeoNames' own export/zip/readme.txt states: "For Ireland we have only the first letters of the full postal codes (for copyright reasons)" — this is not a gap, it's GeoNames' own compliance with the exact same ECAD licensing boundary. Fetched and verified directly: exactly 139 rows, 139 distinct routing keys, all 4 provinces (Connacht/Leinster/Munster/Ulster) present, every row has a coordinate. admin_name1/admin_code1 (province, single-letter C/L/M/U) are already populated on every row. admin_name2/admin_name3 (county, post-town) are empty in this file — GeoNames doesn't carry the routing-key→county join, matching the gap the FedEx research already flagged (post-town→county is an approximate join requiring a separate gazetteer, not present in any raw source found).

This single GeoNames file supersedes the gist+autoaddress.com plan. The FedEx research's tier-5 sources (gist.github.com/ajoorabchi/..., autoaddress.com/articles/eircode-routing-keys/) were never licence-checked and don't need to be now — GeoNames already ships the same 139-row routing-key list under an already-verified CC BY 4.0 licence, avoiding two unverified sources entirely.

Licence: CC-BY-4.0, verified against export/zip/readme.txt on 2026-08-29 (same file as every other GeoNames-sourced entry in this catalogue) — Ireland's entry is the copyright-restricted row itself, not a separate caveat blocking use of what IS included.

County enrichment (admin_name2) — optional, not attempted this pass

Adding county would need a post-town → county join (Wikipedia's Counties_of_Ireland page, CC BY-SA facts, same treatment as other Wikipedia-derived admin facts in this catalogue) as sketched in the FedEx research. Not required for a sellable product — the base 139-row file with province already ships something real. Flag as a possible enrichment, not a blocker.

licence_status (proposed — needs human sign-off before shipping)

{
  "channel": "postal-codes-r2",
  "source_url": "https://download.geonames.org/export/zip/IE.zip",
  "licence_id": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "collected_at": "2026-08-29",
  "decision": "compatible",
  "decided_by": "claude-session-2026-08-29",
  "decided_at": "2026-08-29"
}

Proposed tier

B ($49). Single source normalised in place. Real derivation work (admin_code1 already usable as-is, ISO 3166-2:IE prefix convention should be checked — GeoNames' bare "C"/"L"/"M"/"U" vs IE-C/IE-L/IE-M/IE-U per the FedEx research's own note) but no second source consolidated. Genuinely thin (139 rows, only 2 of 13 columns beyond the base 5 populated) but that thinness is the real shape of what's legally available for Ireland, same as AL's bashki gap — not a build shortcoming.

Verdict

Build it. No licensing obstacle. This is a smaller, cleaner build than the FedEx-schema research anticipated — one already-verified source instead of two unverified community ones. Not yet built for this product — this note is the research/decision record only; no data/ folder exists yet for ie.

Build — 2026-08-30 (local only, not published)

Built via datasets/ie/scripts/build_postal_codes_product.py. 139 rows, all 4 provinces, admin_code1 upgraded to real ISO 3166-2:IE codes (verified against Wikipedia's ISO_3166-2:IE page: C/L/M/U → IE-C/IE-L/IE-M/IE-U — trivial, no ambiguity). admin_name2/admin_name3 (county, post-town) ship empty as disclosed — no county-enrichment join attempted, per the research note's own scoping.

Frictionless validation: valid: True.

Status: built and validated locally only. Nothing published to R2, nothing committed to git. datasets/ie/README.md and datapackage.yml updated in place (tier B, premium_source_key: ie/ie.zip, real sources/licenses, replacing the "Multiple sources" placeholder). Note: datapackage.yml already had is_premium: true before this build — the live R2 ie.csv (5,960 bytes per the old resource entry) was not inspected in this pass; unclear what it currently contains or whether it matches this rebuild.