Govt. tries to introduce Identify cards on the Backdoor

national | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis

Sunday August 27, 2017 02:07

by anon

The recent furore over Public Service Card (PSC) has highlighted the sly and underhand way the government has tried to introduce identity cards through the backdoor. In a typical fashion for the political system in Ireland, they have without any public discussion, legislation or clear thought tried to push this through to the unsuspecting public or at least most of them. Even the police state next door, the UK, rejected identity cards when the UK House of Lords rejected identity cards in early 2006.

However if it wasn’t for the bravery of a pensioner in her 70s who was denied her state pension for the past 18 months because she would refused to register for the “voluntary” card, then this might not have come to the public consciousness

Unfortunately the Revenue Commissioners have already managed to push 2.5 million of these cards on the public which to some extent shows the utter complacency and apathy out there.
Since the card was introduced there has been a steady creeping set of conditions where the card is claimed to be needed such as applications for passports, driving licenses, pensions, social welfare and the list is growing daily. And now legislation which would prevent banks, insurance companies and other private firms from accessing the data, has been removed, allowing them to demand that you have the card are on the way. In other words identity card by the back door. This is not Ireland For years when the rest of Europe had various forms of identity cards, we prided ourselves on the fact that we didn’t have such Orwellian institutions.

In typical fashion the conceited people behind this have claimed it will save money on fraud, but apparently the actual amount same is minute. Just like when several years ago the Joan Burton of the Labour party claimed there was €600 million of welfare fraud going on and the right-wing media made a huge deal out of it, partially to distract attention from the fact the 1% were bailed out for tens of billions when in subsequent weeks, it was revealed through Dail questions that the actual figure was less than €60 million. Strangely though this fact correction got basically no press. All that matter was the lie was out there and it did it’s work. Likewise the lies behind the PSC card.

However when you “follow the money” as they say, it turns out the government has spent €60 million so far on this and like all things in the NeoLiberal everything must be privatised religion this work has to be out-sourced which means there is a private company making serious money on this and at the end of the day for our sold-out politicians, that’s all that matters. In fact nothing else matters, only that “private enterprise” makes a ‘sustainable’ profit.
So hopefully now that this whole issue is out in the open, people will take a stance and refuse to register and co-operate in any way with this underhand thing.
The way you are likely to come across it is with a letter like that shown in the attached image to this story.

Refs:
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/woman-s-...94216

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Govt. tries to introduce Identify cards on the Backdoor