Why Are So Many People Suddenly “Misplacing” Their Public Services Cards?(And every other bit of ID that somehow lands on buses, footpaths, shop counters and car parks…)
Lately it feels like every time you scroll through Facebook, someone is holding up yet another Public Services Card they “found” on the seat of a bus, on the ground outside Tesco, or lying abandoned on the side of the road.
Driver’s licences.
Medical cards.
Passport cards.
PSC after PSC after PSC.
Ireland’s identity is being dropped all over the country — literally.
And the line we keep being fed is:
“People are just forgetting.”
Really?
In a system where you need three forms of ID just to update an address?
Where every appointment, every payment, every service demands PPS + proof of address + passport + utility bill + blood sample?
We’re genuinely expected to believe that people are suddenly losing the very things they cannot function without?
There’s something deeper happening here.
Something quieter.
Something nobody in Government wants to admit.
Because when a population starts dropping essentials in large numbers, it’s a sign of a society under pressure.
A country where people are living on stress autopilot.
Where life has become so overwhelming that the basics slip through the cracks.
You see it everywhere:
• Parents sleeping in their clothes because they’re too exhausted to change.
• Workers skipping meals while wages stay frozen and rent keeps rising.
• Disabled adults waiting years for assessments, supports, answers that never come.
• Volunteers and key holders in small clubs — yes, including the Wicklow club in our story — blocked from even travelling or checking in on someone, because control has replaced common sense.
• Friends pushed away by rules written by people who never carry the weight themselves.
• And in our own story: a girl skipping meals to afford club fees while the organisation smiles for the cameras and counts the medals.
Stress does something strange to people.
It makes you forget things.
It makes you disconnect.
It makes you lose your grip — not just on your ID card, but on life around you.
That’s the part nobody in official Ireland wants to talk about:
These “lost” ID cards are not accidents.
They’re symptoms.
Little flags on the footpaths of a country struggling to hold itself together.
Quiet proof that people are overwhelmed, stretched thin, and operating in a fog.
When people start dropping the essentials, it means the pressure has gone beyond the limit.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth:
Ireland in 2025 is a place where too many people are at breaking point —
from families
to carers
to club volunteers
to people just trying to survive the week.
The signs are right in front of us.
Scattered across bus seats.
Fallen beside shop doors.
Left behind on pavements.
You can tell a lot about a country by what its people stop holding onto.
Right now, Ireland is dropping far more than cards.
It’s dropping stability.
It’s dropping trust.
It’s dropping patience with systems that take more than they give.
If the powers-that-be want to understand the real Ireland — the Ireland we’ve talked about all year — they don’t need another report or another roundtable or another photo-op.
They just need to walk down any street, look at the IDs lying on the ground, and ask:
What have we done to bring people to this point of forgetting?
And more importantly —
When do we finally start fixing it?