You need a personal public service number to get married in Ireland, but in order to get one, you need to be married. It’s one of the most intractable double binds on offer here and it’s very frustrating when you’re trying to beat the Grim Reaper by getting hitched.
I got a PPS number when I bought the house in West Cork. My solicitor arranged it. A different but equally bedevilling Catch-22 applied to that.
So I thought, all right, I will. I better get married, make a will and prepare for the end
In order to buy a house in Ireland I needed a PPS number. But to get a PPS number I needed to have an address in Ireland.
I went round and round this conundrum as it snarled up the conveyancing, until eventually my solicitor got his secretary to get me a PPS number by presenting my potential new address as my actual address, enabling me to then buy that address.
The builder boyfriend did not get a PPS number because the transaction was in my name. And that didn’t matter until we decided that so many people we know have fallen ill and died these past few years, we ought to get married so we can be each other’s next of kin, ready for when we inevitably start keeling over, as everybody seems to be, entirely normally, according to the authorities.
One in two will get cancer. One in three has high blood pressure. Heart attacks are ten a penny. If you go for a walk you might have a seizure out of nowhere and fall off a cliff. Untimely death is the norm. Get used to it. So I thought, all right, I will. I better get married, make a will and prepare for the end.
We went to the registry office and tried to serve our marriage notice. After half an hour of document-checking, the nice lady said it was no good just me having a PPS number, the BB needed one too.
She put our application on hold and recommended we try the Citizens Advice centre that would help him get one.
Off we trotted to the Citizens Advice centre, and it told us he couldn’t have a PPS number until he owned or rented an address in Ireland in his name.
We explained he lived in my house, which was our house, and while we weren’t married, we wanted to be. ‘Oh yes, that would work,’ said the lady. ‘If you get married, or even serve the notice and bring the paperwork here, I can get you a PPS number. You need to go to the registry office…’
We left him PPS-less. There just wasn’t a way. We’ll have to go to Vegas to get married.
In terms of having this number for public service entitlement, I haven’t heard of any public services here, particularly. Healthcare is insurance-based. I’ve never seen a bus or a train, never mind imagined we might want a free pass for one when we’re old so that we can spend all day trying to get somewhere.
As for utilities, we don’t even have a refuse collection. No mains gas, no mains water. I applied for mains water, when the well water turned my hair green, and a man rang back and said that even if I paid for the entire installation to run the main from 300 metres down the road, they still wouldn’t do it – because they don’t want to.
I couldn’t argue with that. ‘So if I pay €20,000 you’re still not interested?’ ‘No, we wouldn’t want to own any extra main or be responsible for it,’ said the man, as though that was the most obvious thing in the world for a water company. ‘You’d get money as well from us using the water, on an on-going basis, and everyone who lives here forevermore after that,’ I pointed out. But he said that wasn’t of any interest to them. Of course it wasn’t. We’ve tried using money to get stuff here before. No one is remotely interested in being paid for anything.
After the plumber came back, fixed one shower tray in place and then left again, I rang him sobbing and offered to pay him anything if he would finish the bathrooms.
‘It’s not about money,’ he said, in a philosophical voice. I knew this. I knew he only took our job because we hit it off. He’s an anti-vaxxer like us. He believes in God and the Devil and the end of days.
He enjoys talking to us because we don’t disavow him of his notions. We are on the same spiritual vibration. It’s the only reason he agreed to do our job.
But because he’s busy and his wife has just left him, he can’t get here often enough and we can’t find another plumber, so we don’t have any bathrooms, or even one hot tap, nine months after moving here.
Serviceless, stateless, off-grid and off our heads, in all likelihood, is how we shall remain.
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