44 Owen Keegan

Once upon a time, it was possible to walk around an urban thoroughfare in Ireland and not fear your day being destroyed by remorseless men in uniform. Nowadays, however, to meet a fellow citizen in the street is to encounter a shadow of a man or woman, unable to conduct a civil conversation without constantly consulting a timepiece.

Few events in recent history have illustrated the supine, defeated state of the Irish public as comprehensively as the introduction to Irish cities of wheel clamping. The general response to this outrage was at the time characterized by casual submissiveness and an almost sadomasochistic fascination with the clamping device itself. Those who operate this monstrous insult to public liberty informed us, courtesy of the media, that the public’s response was proving to be ‘generally very good’. Most people had been understanding, we were told, of the necessity to ‘free up’ the capital’s traffic system. Those who fell victim to this appalling abuse of their rights were philosophical, accepting their medicine with polite resignation. The law was the law, after all.

Let us be absolutely clear. The introduction of wheel clamping in Dublin had nothing at all – repeat, nothing at all – to do with easing traffic congestion. It had to do, and only to do, with extracting even more money from motorists, who were already paying through the nose, ears, eyes and other orifices for the privilege of owning cars. A leaflet distributed to Dublin households by Dublin Corporation, as part of its highly successful public relations campaign to justify the importation of this outrageous practice, described wheel clamping as a ‘traffic-management measure’ and claimed that ‘illegal parking restricts traffic movement and causes congestion’. Even if this were always true, which it is not, it would not amount to a justification of the introduction of wheel clamping. Illegally parked cars which restrict traffic movement and cause congestion were not the kind of illegally parked cars being clamped under this new, inhuman regime, which zeroed in on easy targets: people who overstayed their time by a few minutes in a parking bay, or who overslept in the morning and came downstairs to encounter a yellow encumbrance adhering to their mode of transport. Wheel clamping was not a ‘traffic-management measure’, but a form of extortion.

The previous system of parking tickets was at least redeemed by some elements of humanity. Traffic wardens were usually vaguely human, and could be appealed to on that basis. Moreover, they had systems, which could be cracked. Once you figured out how a particular warden operated, it was possible to lengthen the odds on obtaining a penalty by various stratagems which are now, sadly, about to become obsolete. Under the old system, you sometimes won and sometimes lost, but generally speaking the system was fair, reasonable and flexible. The clamping regime left no prospect of escape, being inhuman not merely in its consequences, but also in its demeanour, in its imperviousness to human intervention. What had always been a blood sport became the equivalent of hare coursing.

Wheel clamping, of course, like so much else of our public policy, was an idea imported from Britain – imitation being the most noticeable talent of those who run our public affairs. It would never, of course, occur to such people to look at the broader context in which wheel clamping is implemented in Britain – the fact, for example, that it is combined with the benefits of a functioning public transport system. Wheel clamping has been in force in London for many years, but there is virtually no place in London where one is more than ten minutes’ walk from an Underground station, a system rendering any area of a vast metropolis reachable within an hour.

If an Englishman’s home is his castle, an Irishman’s car is his chariot, his indispensable ally in moving about his benighted island home. In Dublin there is, for most people, no alternative to driving into the city. Visitors to our capital city choke in disbelief when informed that there is no rail link between Dublin city centre and Dublin airport, a neglect which has led to half of north Dublin being turned into a car park and made the process of parking a car at the airport more time-consuming than the air journey between Dublin and London. The very same authorities which recently introduced wheel clamping have for decades stonewalled attempts to progress with any form of underground or light rail system for Dublin. The same people who have wined and dined and winked and nodded with lobbyists for the road and motor industries, now lecture us about our dependency on the motor car.

The man to ultimately blame is Owen Keegan. From the very moment of his appointment as head of traffic with Dublin Corporation, it began to seem obvious that Mr Keegan did not like motor vehicles very much. He introduced a series of traffic restrictions in Dublin with no apparent purpose but to drive drivers mad. Once, for example, you could turn right from South Great George’s Street on to Dame Street. At a stroke of Mr Keegan’s pen, this simple manoeuvre was arbitrarily outlawed, and anyone wanting to access College Green from South Great George’s Street had to detour around Christ Church and up along the quays. In any other context, apparent doltishness would be seen for what it is, but Mr Keegan was knowingly playing to a gallery of bicycle-clipped commentators guaranteed to hail every attempt to stick it to the motorist, regardless of legality or sense.

For years, Irish car owners had been browbeaten into believing that they are a class of neo-criminals who poison the atmosphere, endanger public safety and block the roads. That they have been made to believe this, while simultaneously being forced to pay for these selfsame roads, was an awesome feat of public indoctrination. That car drivers had been persuaded that traffic chaos in Dublin and elsewhere was the result of their selfishness, their lack of public spirit, was one of the great wonders of the modern world.

In a modern society, a motor car is, for better or worse, an extension of the self, an essential means of getting about and taking care of business and responsibility. To clamp the motor vehicle of a citizen, therefore, is tantamount to withdrawing that person’s liberty for the purpose of revenue collection. It is unthinkable that even unelected bureaucrats like Owen Keegan could succeed in the reintroduction of the stocks. Yet citizens stand disconsolately by as this menace to society stealthily introduces a tyranny just as immobilizing of personal liberty, and therefore equally monstrous.