You may have read about the man who faked his own death in the Paddington rail disaster: Karl Hackett (37) pretended he had died in the derailment last October so that he could assume a new identity, and on Monday last he was given a suspended five-month jail sentence in London for wasting police time.
Wasting police time is a serious offence, but it seems a bit unfair that people can be so harshly treated by the law for merely trying to assume a new identity, or reinvent themselves.
In this country, reinvention of the self seems to be all very well when important people are involved. We are supposed to disapprove of people like Karl Hackett, yet admire Martin McGuinness, for example, because he has, as our Northern Editor pointed out recently, "reinvented himself as a skilful politician".
But Karl Hackett was not given the chance to reinvent himself. He too might well have become a skilful politician, a brilliant surgeon or a concert pianist. How can we tell?
In this country, forging new identities is almost a way of life. Recently, an article in this (very) newspaper informed us that the "fractured playground" of Irish identity has proved a fertile pitch for generations of our playwrights.
Fractured playground indeed. Isn't it desperate to think that our great playwrights have to make do with an ill-maintained playing area like that, and they kicking around great notions of Irishness and the Irish? Where are the landscape gardeners of the soul when we need them? Where is the level green Gaelic sward of the imagination that our proud nation deserves? Are there no National Lottery funds to be spared?
Our playwrights are so obsessed with identity issues that (as the Irish Times article pointed out) split or multiple personalities are a feature of many Irish plays, most famously Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come, and both Da and A Life by Hugh Leonard.
If a member of the Garda Siochana were to attend any of these plays and find difficulty in keeping up with the identity switches in the plot (one could easily get confused between Philadelphia's Gar O'Donnell past and present) he would be well within his rights to go on stage and arrest the character for wasting police time.
Of course he might not be sure which Gar to apprehend. Then you would have a guard with an identity crisis, which on stage and in real life would probably be a first.
We are also supposed to be impressed with the notion of the tortured writer, the supposed outsider who doesn't have a perfectly ordinary identity like other people. These writers are psychically incapable of settling anywhere, so they have to live for example "between" New York and Dublin, or Bohola and Ballina, depending on their circumstances. The latter circumstances would be very poor, of course.
For example, when the novelist Brian Moore died just over a year ago, there was a great deal of regurgitated nonsense about him being "a writer without a country", when in truth he just happened to be from Belfast, but clearly belonged to North America. And you can hardly blame Belfast people for reinventing themselves as Americans, or indeed as anyone.
Another dreary issue is that of Elizabeth Bowen's identity. Is she an Irish or an English writer, literary types ask each other regularly, until one of them loftily remarks that the lady herself claimed to be really at home only "in mid-crossing between Holyhead and Dun Laoghaire". . .
There are a lot of confused people like that out there on the Irish Sea, dithering over their identity and driving the Stena Sealink staff up the walls. It can be very difficult when you bump into one of those lost souls on the ferry, and, politely striking up a conversation, ask them where they hail from, or even worse, who they are.
Fortunately, most of these lonely creatures spend all their time staring over the ferry rails into the sea, so normal travellers without identity problems are safe enough if they keep to the bar.
Incidentally, it is no wonder we have problems with perceptions of Irish identity in other countries. Our diplomatic representation abroad involves little more than shifting the same people around the world, year after year. In effect, therefore, we are represented globally not by people who are Irish in any real sense, since they have all lived out of suitcases for so long, but - by virtue of such living - by emigrants, travellers, nomads, vagabonds and international hoboes.