I've already alluded to clamping. For the uninitiated, the clamping division go around in Dublin Corporation vehicles that bear the legend "Keeping Dublin Moving" on the side. This is blatantly misleading. In fact the clampers have little or nothing to do with keeping anything moving. Instead, you'll see them skulking around places like Merrion Square on a Saturday morning, clamping vehicles, where drivers have neglected to pay for a 2-hour parking ticket. Very often this happens because people aren't completely clear that they do have to pay for parking on a Saturday that requirement has only been introduced relatively recently. What's worse is that the cars are not even occupying parking spaces that might otherwise be used by other people, given that there are generally scores of parking places that are vacant throughout the entire day in peripheral non-retail areas of the city like this.
The clampers are ruthless and aggressive in their approach to the dirty work that they do. Stopping Dublin moving would be more like it. I've only been clamped once. It was on a Saturday morning, and I pulled into a loading bay in Clarendon St. The majority of loading bays will never be used on a Saturday, and until a few months age, with that as a backdrop, they could be freely used for parking. I went into a shop about 30 yards away, across the road. I was gone about 60 seconds when the clampers emerged. A guy who was sitting outside a cafe and beside the car told them that I had just run into the shop across the road he offered to go and get me. Far from slowing them down, this inspired them to move even quicker. They immediately slapped a clamp on and pissed off like a shot, in case I might just get irate on my return. I was gone from the car less than five minutes in all, had done nothing to disrupt or otherwise hold traffic up, and as it happened was on a kind of a mercy mission for someone else and there I was, not just with a whopping fine to pay, but worse, in a position where my schedule for the day (and it was a busy one) was completely fucked up.
Of course it's obvious what's really going on. This is just a money-making scam on the part of the Corporation. They've brought in a private company to do job for them. Everyone involved is on targets. And there's no way that it has anything to do with justice, fair play or the greater good of the citizenry at large. It has to do with money. And guess what? They're now about to introduce pay parking on Sundays, and the clampers will be out as well. Just in time for Christmas. What a nice, caring gesture, eh?
The same is true of the system of litter fines that were introduced over the past few years by Dublin Corporation. Have you ever seen these guys going around searching in people's rubbish? Well, they're litter wardens, and they're trying to identify the culprits responsible for leaving plastic bags in the street. In itself, this sounds like an honourable endeavour, and in a lot of cases, it may indeed be. However in practice, when litter wardens are given targets that they have to meet, they can become sloppy and careless and get things entirely wrong. The problem is that the system is one like parking tickets where you are guilty until proven innocent.
To give one example, a poster for hotpress one poster was picked up in a street in the city centre. We never give posters out in the street. In fact the only place that they're used generally is in retail outlets. What almost certainly happened was that the poster had been nicked from a shop by a kid, for a lark and was then dropped on the street when some other form of amusement became more pressing. It could have happened in a dozen different ways, but one thing was certain: we hadn't put it there, nor had anyone acting on our behalf. And yet we were hit with a litter fine. This may seem like a trivial incident. But it isn't trivial at all when a system is operated by a branch of the machinery of state that is profoundly wrong and unjust, as this system so often is in practice.
Everywhere you turn, the Corporation are engaged in policies that seem to make no sense at all. Why, in the name of Jaysus, are we spending money like crazy on stupid little bollards and islands in the middle of the road, the only effect of which is to slow traffic down and create bottlenecks? I was in Paris recently and at one roundabout, about twelve different junctions come together. It was a joy to experience the marvellously controlled and negotiated chaos. In Dublin, they'd attempt to regulate it with endless traffic lights, and the traffic would back up for miles as a result. In Paris, drivers twisted and turned around the place in a way that made a crazy kind of sense, and they got through it with a minimum of delay. It would have taken about five times as long here, because that's what the planners seem to want.
Did you ever notice how much more smoothly the traffic flows when the traffic lights are all broken? And how there are no accidents? It's because people are actually capable of using their intelligence although bureaucrats don't like to acknowledge that.
So to the clamping division of Dublin Corporation (and the one that they're probably planning in Cork right now) I'd say if you really want to keep the city moving, how's about a nationwide No Traffic Lights Day. We'd all get around much better. I can guarantee it!