Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
There was a time when you would have been delighted for someone else to take your place for a day. Not any more. Today there seems to be no shortage of enterprising people who not only want to be you, but also want to spend all your money while they're at it. Identity theft is now an ever-present threat. You put a tenner's worth of petrol on your Laser card and two weeks later a letter arrives telling you that your bank account has been bled dry, your overdraft limit hit and, by the way, you are wanted across the globe on several counts of international terrorism.
It is usually your money, and not you, that the thieves want. Everyone knows someone who has opened a credit card bill and discovered that someone has gone on a splurge in Champion Sports on their account. The banks, of course, are always suspicious and you can spend a wretched three months trying to persuade them that you most certainly would not spend €3,000 on Elizabeth Duke at Argos.
It is increasingly common for e-mails to arrive, purporting to be from your bank and claiming some security breach that can be fixed if you could just be so kind as to remind them of your personal details, account numbers, passwords and which flower pot you leave your spare key under. As you blindly go through the process, that sharp pain you feel as you click the mouse is of a hook tugging at the corner of your mouth.
In a cashless society, every transaction has the potential for trouble. So now you break into a sweat every time the waiter takes your Visa card more than three feet from your table. Chip and Pin has been introduced, but as you punch in your code, you can't help but feel the hot breath of the person standing too close behind you in the queue. When tearing up ATM receipts, you prefer to spread the pieces across several bins, just to be sure.
These days, it is wise to invest in a small paper shredder, although if it is breezy on the morning that the green bin gets collected then you could end up scrabbling about the street in your dressing gown, attempting to prevent an impromptu ticker-tape parade.
Besides, there are now so many things to do with your identity other than just rack up debts on it. In Britain, for instance, there have been scams that allow immigrants to marry you without you ever knowing about it. There would appear to be no foolproof way of preventing much of this. There will be nothing to it, but to make sure that when you die, you are cremated, the ashes run through a sieve and scattered into the sea, during a storm. With the advances being made in cloning, it is better to be safe than sorry.