Essentially the same deal in Ireland, with Eircodes. They were originally created as private dataset with ownership, and now you have to license access to it to use it.

Eircodes are better than postcodes, in that there's 1 per building/address/apartment, however they're discontinuous, so adjacent buildings will have distinctly different eircodes.

The article highlighted the difficulty of shopping centers and apartment buildings, from my experience trying to validate a large number of Eircode <-> addresses for a project, this is definitely an issue. The worse issue is that there's no way to just send someone out to check, because the eircode isn't like a house number that's posted somewhere. (Leaving aside the problem that valid Irish addresses can have no numbers outside of the eircode, and eircodes are a recent, and therefore non-traditional addition)