Wexford Gardaí have brushed aside Cat in the Hat news after viral pictures and videos were shared online over recent days. The images were AI-generated, and Curracloe was not the scene of any real incident.
Social media users saw the posts spread across Facebook, with claims that the Cat in the Hat had turned up in Glanmire, Cahir, Curracloe and Broadford Park. In Limerick, a local Facebook page shared pictures showing a man dressed as the Cat in the Hat standing in a front garden and on top of a car.
Wexford Gardaí and Curracloe
Wexford Gardaí later posted on social media to set the record straight. Their message cut through the viral version of events: the Cat in the Hat was not in Curracloe.
The online posts had the look of real sightings, which is why they moved so quickly through local groups in Cork, Limerick, Wexford, Tipperary and Dublin. But the images and videos were part of an AI prompt trend, not evidence of a real person causing trouble in any of those places.
AI prompt trend on Facebook
The wider pattern matters because the images were not isolated jokes sent to one corner of the internet. They were shared widely on social media, and the false sightings appeared in several places at once, making the hoax feel local wherever people saw it.
That same kind of prompt-driven image making had already been used in a viral trend last year, when images of a homeless man were placed into a house. Here, the same mechanism turned a children’s character into a fake neighbourhood sighting and pushed a made-up story into local feeds.
For anyone who came across the posts, the practical read is simple: the Cat in the Hat sightings were not real, and the Gardaí message is the only public correction in the source material. Who created the images first and how the hoax began is not explained.
