Lost property items typically include mobile phones, keys, wireless headphones and prescription glasses. Pic: Larry Cummins

“TIME was, it used to be umbrellas that people left on the bus, but now it’s mainly phones,” says Liz O’Donovan.

We’re in an upstairs office in the Bus Éireann Capwell Depot, and dozens of phones of every make and brand are laid out across a desk, from the clunkiest old battered Nokia to the newest iPhone.

Liz is chief cashier in Capwell, and Frances McCarthy is assistant services manager. They have placed the phones on display, along with several other items of lost property.

This isn’t the lost property office, that’s downstairs and Frances says it’s not big enough to spread everything out for a photograph, so this room will have to serve for today’s meeting with The Echo.

Liz says phones have long-since replaced umbrellas as the main item likely to be found on buses. That’s not to say there aren’t any umbrellas, there is a good selection here, it’s just that phones have passed them out in recent years.

From a large box, Frances and Liz empty out wireless ear-buds, wallets, vapes, watches, reading glasses, prescription glasses, sunglasses, handbags, fobs, lanyards, keys, Leap cards, bank cards and free travel cards. A lonesome crutch lays across the table.

Liz says electronic devices such as tablets and laptops regularly show up, and everything tends to be kept for two months, after such time all unclaimed devices are brought to the Bus Éireann IT department, where they are wiped, before being given to charity.

Clothes such as hats, scarves and gloves are, after two months, given to the Society of St Vincent de Paul (SVP).

More unusual items left behind

Sometimes, Frances says, people will be heading for their holidays and, in their excitement and busy-ness, they might leave behind large suitcases, something that can prove disastrous if they’re rushing to catch a flight.

Musical instruments are sometimes left behind, and last year someone left a ukulele on a bus, necessitating a flight back to Ireland to retrieve it.

Frances adds that sometimes more unusual items are found on the buses.

“We currently have a bicycle in lost property, and you’d wonder how someone could forget to take their bicycle off the bus.”

More exotically, she remembers, perhaps 20 years ago, someone left a snake in a glass case on a bus.

“Now, it was only a small snake, but it was still a snake.”

A regular find during college term, she says, is students’ project work. “It has been great to be able to reunite people with their work, especially if you can imagine the work a student could put in, it could be their final project after their year’s work, so you could imagine the anxiety, and the relief when they locate it with us.

“Even the phones, when you talk to the customers, and you reunite them with their property, you get to see how important the items can be to them, especially the emotional connection people can have, a child with a lost toy, or a wallet with photographs.

“I had one woman who had lost her phone, and she had nothing backed up from her phone, so she said it was all her kids’ photographs over the years, it was everything, and as luck would have it, the bus she had been travelling on had come back to our depot and I was able to find the phone, but the relief for that woman!

“You don’t always think how much things mean to people, but it’s the personal side of things,” she says.

“Often people will leave behind things of huge sentimental value, like wedding rings and engagement rings, and we would go to a fair amount of trouble to track people down. Now sometimes, if it’s something like a bank card, we can get onto the bank and we’ll ask the bank to get the person to contact us, but we have sometimes gone to the ends of the Earth for people.”

Liz makes the observation that it would be very helpful if people put their contact details on important items of personal property.

Going above and beyond to reunite people with belongings 

Frances says that Liz regularly goes above and beyond the call of duty to help reunite people with their goods, especially, she adds, older people who may have lost a travel pass or a wallet.

“Liz is an avid cyclist, and she has been known to jump on her bike and, if someone is living nearby, she will call to their house and bring them their lost property,” Frances says.

Liz recalls one such incident, where they found a man’s wallet containing a medical card and over €1,000 in cash. Finding a woman’s name and phone number in the wallet, Liz made the call.

“I said are you [woman’s name] and she was really Cork - ‘And why do you want to know?’ and I said, do you know [man’s name] and she said ‘I do, girl, what’s all this about?’ so I explained I was from Bus Éireann and she got onto his sister for me.”

The man’s sister wanted to come and collect the wallet, but Liz explained that she had to give it to the owner himself. It can be a complicated enough business making absolutely sure the right person has been contacted, she says, and identification has to be verified before valuables can be handed over.

Establishing where the owner of the wallet lived and arranging to meet him and his sister, Liz hopped on her bike – “With €1,000 in the wallet!” - and set out across town. Meeting the man and his sister, and checking that he was who he claimed he was, Liz reunited him with his wallet and learned that he had recently suffered a bereavement and, in his grief, he had left his wallet on the bus.

“Well, it was like the poor man had won the Lotto,” Liz smiles. “We had a great old chat, and he wanted to buy me a drink! But, you know, even the smallest thing can mean the world to people, and often people drop in chocolates as a thank-you, or they might bring a reward for the driver. People can be very good.

“There’s been many, many unusual cases like that. There was an elderly woman recently lost a load of money, and it was one of our colleagues below found her purse with her post office book, so we rang, and then the guards escorted her here to the yard and she came in and collected the purse and all the money.”

Frances says that such good news stories always give the staff in Capwell a great lift.

“Seeing the person reunited with the item they have lost, whether ’tis an item of big monetary value, or just an item that’s of sentimental value, or an item of necessity like a passport, or like with students losing project work, it’s a great part of your working day.

“You really feel you’ve done something good, and you get great pride in being part of a group of colleagues who will always try and go out of their way for people.”

As Frances is talking, The Echo photographer – ever eagle-eyed - spots a handwritten letter in the box of lost property. Folded, crumpled and torn, it’s on lined notepaper and is dated November, 2019. It begins “Dearest Santa Claus,” which everyone in the room agrees is a pretty promising start.

“I have been extra good this year. I eat all my dinner, go to bed early and work hard,” the letter continues. “Thank you for spoiling me yet again last year, Santa, you just get it so right every year.”

Skipping to the end, overleaf, we discover the author is female, and she signs off with three kisses. The writer then says her favourite present was a suitcase, which she says she used visiting several named European destinations, adding with a smiley face that it is already a well-travelled case. As we read on, we begin to suspect Santa’s correspondent may be older than we initially imagined, and the list of presents begins with a request for a voucher for nails and a facial at a named beauty salon, money toward a tattoo, money toward a holiday, teeth-whitening solution, a bigger suitcase, and “a surprise”.

The Echo photographer discreetly folds the letter and puts it back in the box, and we change the subject, trusting that Santa, who as children of all ages know is magical, will have seen the wish-list, even if it was tucked away in the lost property office in Capwell, and everyone had a happy Christmas, 2019, and the two Christmases since too.

Downstairs, Liz and Frances show The Echo the actual lost property office. If we had been expecting an Aladdin’s Cave, or that giant warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, we’re let down gently when it turns out to be a pretty small room behind a narrow counter. Everything is neatly filed away, and each item is carefully tagged and recorded.

Sure enough, leaning against the wall, neatly tagged, is the unclaimed bicycle Frances mentioned.

As we leave the bus depot at Capwell, just one last question remains. If a person has just got off the bus and watched it pull away and suddenly realises they’ve left something behind on it, what should they do? Should they panic?

“Don’t panic!” both women reply in unison.

“Call our customer care number, and customer care will get onto us then in the lost property office,” Frances says.

“We would have a lot of people ring us and say ‘I’ve just got off the bus, I’ve left a bag, an item, on the bus and the bus is still travelling’, we’ll identify the bus, and our AVL [Automatic Vehicle Location] service controllers – they’re supervisors here and they have a direct link with all our busses – will contact the driver.

“It’s very common that the driver will then say ‘Yeah, I have it, I’ll keep it in my cab with me’.

“We’ll get back to the person, and when the bus comes back in, the person is reunited with their property.

“It works out pretty successfully a lot of the time,” she says.

“If we can at all, we’ll always do our best to reunite you with whatever you’ve lost.”

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