AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
In England in medieval times stocks were a form of public punishment. The miscreant would be locked in a device on the village green where passing folk could hurl abuse and rotten eggs at the culprit. In the modern equivalent cars are clamped and the abuse gets hurled at clampers.
• Other forms of medieval punishment, torture like the thumb screw and the rack, or burning witches, have long ago been abandoned but the modern equivalent of the stocks are popular and profitable and I think, where used inappropriately, downright uncivilised.
• Clamping might be understandable where a motorist has parked dangerously, but not for shoppers, parked in a supermarket forecourt who have overrun their pay and display tickets by a few minutes. The unclamping fee of €125, imposed by a private company operating for profit, seems thoroughly disproportionate for a time overrun that’s worth a few cents.
• My own clamping story was revealing. While struggling to get the phone-in for unclamping to work, a guy in a van drew up and the driver said: “Hi love, do you want me to release you?” Who doesn’t want to be released from immobility and the pain of parting with a large fine? “I’m going home to get a weapon, I’ll be back,” he yelled.
• While I waited for the rescuer in my life to arrive passing shoppers said things like “Disgraceful, shouldn’t be allowed,” and then another knight in shining armour offered to get me out of the clamp. How? “Hacksaw,” he said, this unofficial service would have cost €40. Finally, the unclamper, who happened to be the guy who had clamped me, arrived. Passing motorists yelled abuse at him:”F—ing w—-r!”, “Get a job!” Clamping clearly generates a lot of ill-will, it can’t be good for local business and I wonder if clampers suffer PTSD or suffer persecution complexes?
• Parking regulations is that they can vary from place to place. Kilkenny Observer readers are lucky. In Kilkenny municipal area for instance, the council, which looks after about half the 4,500 parking places, operate parking which seems fair and clamping isn’t used. There are a variety of options: on street pay and display, barrier parking where you pay when you leave a park area, a ‘magic’ system payable by app and one suitable for brief errands where the first 15 minutes are free and thereafter the charge is 50 cent for 15 minutes. Fines are graduated from €40 for not displaying a ticket, €60 for no motor tax, to €200 for using a disabled parking permit belonging to someone else.
• While the Kilkenny Count Council spokesperson was happy to share information about parking, APCOA Parking Ireland, the firm responsible for clamping me, are not so transparent about their operation. Questions I sent them, including whether their operatives work on a commission basis for clamping and whether they provide any intervention to help clampers deal with abuse from the public went unanswered. APCOA incidentally, are Europe’s biggest and longest established car parking operation.
• The company do operate an appeals system for fines, and they also have CTV security in the car parks they manage. Unfair then that a friend who had paid and displayed was clamped and, despite appealing, only succeeded in getting half the fine back – surely CTV footage would have shown payment had been made? Unfair too that another individual, who had paid her parking was clamped for getting one digit of her registration wrong at a Luas park and ride.
• One of the side effects of clamping, given my experience, is a profitable sideline for unofficial declampers. Wasn’t he worried about getting into trouble for taking off clamps, I asked the knight with the hacksaw? No, he said, that crowd are too big to bother going to court.
• Maybe forms of clamping could be applied more appropriately to deal with anti-social behaviour. Using back-to-the-future stocks or personal clamps for far-right rioters and arsonists to immobilise them, perhaps, or a form of electronic clamping for far-right on-line agitators, where the punishment would be more fitting for the crime.
• Meantime I think I might add a hacksaw to the emergency equipment in my car.
