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PAULA MORRIN, NURSE: ‘THEY MADE IT SOUND EXTREMELY URGENT’
Paula Morrin, a nurse from Dublin, said she began receiving letters more than a year ago asking her to attend an appointment to register for the public services card. She ignored them. She said she had never claimed a welfare benefit, had never been unemployed, and did not see why she needed the card.
“Nowhere in any of the letters did they mention it might affect a benefit.”
Ms Morrin said she continued to ignore the letters, then they started to arrive more frequently.
“They made it sound extremely urgent. Next thing my phone rang from a number I didn’t know.”
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A woman who phoned Ms Morrin on her mobile at work was calling to tell her she had “missed lots of appointments”.
She said the card was for any social welfare benefits she might claim and that people “will need this card for child benefit”. She eventually made an appointment and went to the local office in Tallaght where her photo was taken.
“They make it sound frantic – that you need it right now.” But when she went to the office to go through the registration the place was “empty”, she said.
She said the person who dealt with her said she “may need” the card for future benefits and that “libraries and all are going to start using it”.
SHARON BRIGGS: ‘I GOT SICK AND TIRED OF GETTING LETTERS’
Sharon Briggs from Bray, Co Wicklow, started getting letters from the Department of Social Protection in 2014 “inviting” her to an appointment to register for a public services card.
“They said my jobseeker’s payment might be affected [if I did not get one],” she says.
But she did not like the idea of the card and said she ignored the letters that kept arriving every few months. “I got sick and tired of getting them so I wrote a letter to them,” she adds.
In it, she expressed concern about the card and in particular the facial recognition software underpinning it. She got no response but recently got a letter giving her an appointment for August 16th, which she did not attend.
Last Monday, Ms Briggs turned up at her local post office in Bray to collect her weekly payment and was told it was not there. She subsequently found it had been transferred to the main post office. “I had a feeling about it,” she said.
Ms Briggs said she and her friend asked if they could verify their identity by bringing passport photographs in to be “scanned” into the system but did not receive any satisfactory answers about how they might verify their identity other than through registering for the card.
Ms Briggs said she wanted to know what information the company producing the card was getting and where her personal information was going.
She said she had promised to put her concern in an email and that if she did not get answers to her questions, she would take the matter to the Minister.