Public Services Card (Part 1)

"But what about my pension...?"

Initially I thought that what follows would be a straightforward account of an encounter I had with the Combine’s Irish branch. This was in the BC years (before covid) when opposition to the Public Services Card was at its height. At the time it seemed like a noble cause to get behind. However as I looked back over everything for this article I began to think differently. What seemed pretty routine and predictable when I started has turned into something quite different to what I expected.

The story begins in August 2017 with a letter from the Department of Social Protection (DSP). Totally out of the blue they were offering me something called a Public Services Card (PSC). They told me I could get this without having to go through the usual hoops. All they needed was my consent to let them use personal information I provided to the Road Safety Authority (RSA) when I renewed my driving licence.

But what exactly is a Public Services Card or PSC - and why would I need one? Apart from stating that “over 2.5 million PSCs have been issued already”, the letter told me nothing useful about the card itself. So if I wanted to find out more I would have to do some research. In those days that meant turning to one of my most trusted resources, The Irish Times web site.

There I came across two online articles written by an Elaine Edwards. The headline over the first read “Privacy campaigners concerned over ‘national ID card by stealth’”.¹ National ID card, eh?! Alarm bells started ringing in my head when I went back to the department’s missive and read this,

Where bodies specified under legislation collect PSI data from a person, that information is also used to maintain the person’s PSI dataset, which is held and managed by DSP.²

A “person’s PSI dataset”? What in God’s name was that? In a footnote at the end of the letter I found an explanation. The footnote is long and couched in legal language but here it is in full:

Section 262 of the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 provides that “public service identity”, in relation to a person means the person’s personal public service number and his/her; surname; forename; date of birth; place of birth; sex; all former surnames (if any); all former surnames (if any) of his or her mother; address; nationality; date of death; certificate of death, where relevant; a photograph of the person, other than in the case of a deceased person; the person’s signature, other than in the case of a deceased person; any other information as may be required for authentication purposes that is uniquely linked to or is capable of identifying that person; any other information that may be prescribed which, in the opinion of the Minister, is relevant to and necessary for the allocation of a personal public service number.³

So this was more than just a simple plastic card with my picture on it. That headline was correct - it was an identity card. Even more sinister was what lay behind it. I was being asked to allow personal details (including anything a future government minister might think was “relevant” and “necessary”) to be added to a central government database managed by the DSP.

When I read the second of Ms. Edwards’ Irish Times articles, the headline alone gave me the heebie-jeebies: ‘Woman’s pension cut after she refuses to get public services card’.⁴ The report stated that the unnamed woman was due to receive a non-contributory pension of €166 per week. However the DSP did not authorise payment because the woman would not apply for a PSC. According to the Times, this had cost her a total of €13,000 to date in lost income.

“Please, sir, I want some more.”

My own state pension was due to kick in about 18 months later. It would be a contributory, not a non-contributory pension. If I were applying for a non-contributory pension, I would be like Oliver Twist asking for an extra portion of gruel. If the Mr Bumble in the DSP told me to ‘eff off’, what could I do? But a contributory pension was different. My entitlement stemmed from the many contributions I had made to the Irish Exchequer over a working life of nearly half-a-century. It was my money and surely they could not stop me having it?

I was still worried though. Maybe I should give my consent to the PSC now, just in case.

In those ‘innocent’ days I assumed that The Irish Times, or at least a few of its journalists, really wanted to fight government over-reach. Now my more sceptical mind wonders about those reports and others on the subject of the PSC. Were they published as a kind of forerunner to the fearmongering deployed to such devastating effect by all media during the covid scam? For example at the time I recall hearing a similar story on the radio about a young man whose social welfare payments were stopped because he would not apply for a PSC.

Back then, however, I was not thinking like that. I was more concerned about my ‘bread-and-butter’. Yet when I considered those brave citizens who, I was being told, had lost money because of their principled stand against the PSC, I felt I could not comply. I decided to ignore the Department’s letter. I would take my chances when I hit the pension age of 66.

About a year later I posted my pension application to the DSP and waited. Then the saga took an odd twist.

In Part 2 I will discuss what happened next.

1. Irish Times, 22 May 2017.

2. Letter from Department of Social Protection, 11 Aug 2017.

3. Ibid. (emphasis added).

4. Irish Times, 22 Aug 2017.