How an address is written in Ireland
An address in Ireland is written in this order: house number and street name, then townland, then town or city, then county, then Eircode. The strongest check here is the Eircode itself: GeoNames' postal code list (31 October 2026), with 139 Eircode prefixes (the first 3 characters of each) for Ireland, current codes only.
The order the lines go in
The parts are named rather than filled in: Spaw does not know an address in Ireland and will not invent one. This block is produced by the same function that rewrites a real address, so the line order, the capitals Ireland asks for and any text its operator prints on every envelope are the checker's own behaviour rather than a second description of it.
Organisation 12 Street name Flat or unit Townland Town or city County Eircode
No recipient line: nothing in the response is about a person, so the name the envelope carries is not part of what is checked.
| field | called here | required | capitals |
|---|---|---|---|
| organization | Organisation | optional | — |
| addressLine1 | Street name | required | — |
| addressLine2 | Flat or unit | optional | — |
| dependentLocality | Townland | optional | — |
| locality | Town or city | required | — |
| administrativeArea | County | optional | — |
| postalCode | Eircode | optional | — |
No house-number rule is carried for Ireland, so the international default is used: the house number comes before the street name. The Eircode is written after the town.
Can Spaw tell whether an address in Ireland exists?
No. No address register is installed for Ireland, so exists answers null: not evaluated, never no. An address can be perfectly formed and still not exist, and nothing here will pretend to know which.
A postcode directory answers a different question. The Eircode is confirmed separately by GeoNames' postal code list, which does not list every code, so one it does not hold is not flagged.
Further reading: How to read an address-existence answer.
Check an address in Ireland
The same lookup the API runs, with Ireland already selected.
Live demo
POST /demo/address · no key needed
Response
Look up any address to see the full API response, straight from the live service. The country decides which format it is read against.
The Eircode
Eircodes in Ireland are checked against the pattern below rather than a description of it, because the shape is too particular to summarise without losing a case.
pattern [\dA-Z]{3} ?[\dA-Z]{4}
A postcode list from a multi-country source is installed for Ireland, so an Eircode here is not only checked for shape but looked up: 139 Eircode prefixes from GeoNames' postal code list, version 2026-10-31. It lists current codes only, so a retired code is not told apart from one it does not hold.
What Ireland calls an address that is not a front door
A PO box, a private mailbox and the other kinds of delivery point below are told apart by the words written on the address, never by a list of whose box is whose. An entry is carried for Ireland, so an address here with none of the words below answers street. The words themselves are international spellings, not the operator's own: no spelling from its addressing guide is held yet.
| address_type | written as |
|---|---|
| private_mailbox Private mailbox at a mail-receiving agency | PMBinternational spellings the checker also reads |
| po_box Post-office box | PO BOX, P O BOXinternational spellings the checker also reads |
| general_delivery Held at the counter for collection | POSTE RESTANTEinternational spellings the checker also reads |
What can be checked for an address in Ireland
Read from the datasets this server holds right now, not written into the page. For most countries the answer is the written form and the postcode shape and nothing beyond them — in particular not the row people assume is always there.
| check | for IE | what the answer means |
|---|---|---|
| Written form | yes | The address is split into the country's own parts and rewritten in the order above. A missing required part is named in one typed reason rather than a general failure. |
| Eircode pattern | yes | Checked against the pattern the table carries for Ireland. A value that does not match answers invalid_postal_code. |
| Eircode exists | yes | 139 Eircode prefixes from GeoNames' postal code list. It lists current codes only, so a retired code is not told apart from one it does not hold. |
| Kind of delivery point | yes | An entry is carried for Ireland, so an address with no marker answers street rather than unknown — though the words it holds are the international spellings, not the operator's own. |
| Street exists | no | No register is installed for Ireland, so a street is neither confirmed nor denied: match_level answers null. |
| Building exists | no | No address register is installed for Ireland, so exists answers null: not evaluated, never no. Absence is not evidence here. |
| Companies at the address | no | No open company register is installed for Ireland, so companies_registered answers null and no mail-drop conclusion is drawn from a count. |
| Known mailbox branch | yes | Mailbox operators' own published branch lists cover this country, and the answer names the operator that matched. |
| Post actually arrives | no | Not from this page, and not from open data in any country: whether post is delivered, and the vacant, residential and agency flags that go with it, are the postal service's own licensed product. Those fields answer deliverability_checked: false rather than a guess. |
Null means not evaluated, never no.
Other countries
Sources
- Google's Address Data Service · address-formats 2026-09-05© Google LLC, CC BY 4.0 (Google Address Data Service); initial import via commerceguys/addressing (MIT)
- The postal operators' addressing guides · address-rules 2026-09-17
- GeoNames' postal code list · geonames-postal-codes 2026-10-31Postal codes, places and centroids from GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0.
- Mailbox operators' published branch lists · mail-drop-locations 2026-10-31
Data synced on 2026-10-31: the newest version among the datasets listed above.
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