The only really surprising thing about the decision of Dublin traffic wardens to challenge the legality of clamping is that something comparable didn't happen earlier. Garda tow-away units have been operating for years now on a very dubious legal basis but nobody has opposed them in law because (a) the Department of Justice would use its big naval guns to sink them, with survivors finished off in the water with the flats of oars; and (b) nobody sensibly takes on the police, anywhere.
So gardai are content to just tow away and then to collect the tow-away fee of £100, thereby sparing the officers the trouble of the due processes of law. Such actions might well be ultra vires or even unconstitutional; for the executive arm of the law in such matters is also the judiciary, and is beyond appeal, with a courtless process in which the "fine" is £100 (though not, I imagine, if you are a member of the Garda Siochana).
Loading area
Do you detect some personal hurt here? You do. Some years ago, I parked my car bearing an Irish Times sticker in an area marked "loading" outside our offices, adjoining a series of metred parking spaces, and otherwise identical to them. I assumed it was loading area for Irish Times use. The moment I was away from the car, a tow-away vehicle moved in.
Tipped off, I ran out and explained my business. The crew was adamant: my vehicle did not have a commercial licence, and only vehicles so licensed could park there. My car was towed and it cost £100 to recover it. No court proceedings followed. Had a traffic warden ticketed me, the fine, through due and constitutional processes of law, would have been £15. The extra-legal process cost me £100. No legal appeal was possible. Had I had the nerve, and the financial support of the Sultan of Brunei, I would have sued the State. Neither was the case.
Furthermore, are there two sets of laws here, one for streets outside Garda stations and one for the rest of the city? This newspaper ran an Editorial a couple of years ago complaining about the situation around Pearse Street Garda Station - double-parking, parking on double yellow lines, parking on the pavement. There was an instant response. Suddenly, parking outside the station was orderly and law-abiding, though now, once again, it resembles a dodgem ring when the electricity dies.
Not just Pearse Street. Fitzgibbon Street, in perhaps the poorest part of the city, rejoices in cars parked on the pavement, cars parked on double yellow lines, cars parked apparently wherever the mood takes their drivers - a fine example indeed of law-abiding behaviour to set to the young (and desperately poor) people of the area. Name your Garda station; does the rule of law apply outside to the gardai as it would to you or me?
On-street parking
Of course gardai want to park their cars outside their place of work. We all do. But we all can't. This is the way of all cities today. We have effectively banned on-street parking, and we compel motorists to leave their cars at home and resort to public transport (collapse in mirthless hysteria, and die sobbing), or park in multi-storey car parks.
A question: which would I rather be, the Sultan of Brunei or the owner of a multi-storey car park in Dublin? No contest. The Sultan, poor bastard, has to keep his people happy, and own an air force and so on. Car park owners have to do nothing. The State's resources - police officers, traffic wardens, clampers, tow-away vehicles and the courts - cattle-drive business towards them. They don't have to advertise, they don't have to strike competitive rates; they are State-enforced local monopolies. Use them or else.
So is it surprising that car park impresarios behave the way they do? The Temple Bar Car Park, now, I especially loathe, for it is run with a predatory and profitable inefficacy. Only one exit lane is virtually ever open, and long queues form trying to get out. I recently arrived in the exit queue having spent less than three hours in the car park, but during the long wait to get out my time in the place reached a minute or so over three hours - for which I was then charged for a full four hours' parking. How sweet it must be to charge people extra because you're saving money by not employing an extra person at the exit; what you win on the swings you gain on the roundabouts.
Local monopolies
If the State creates such local monopolies, it might at least insist that consumers are only actually charged for what they use. Parking spaces are not like hotel rooms. The space for which I am charged for an hour, though I have used it for merely a minute, is then rented out again to someone else the moment I am gone. Though the State presumably licences these car parks (and I don't mean just to print money) and protects their local monopolies, confiscating or clamping the cars of people who try to park elsewhere, it does absolutely nothing to protect the unfortunate consumers from monopolistic multi-storey price-gouging.
Charlie: did you ever think of touching a car park owner for a few million quid? You should have done; and you know, they'd have never squealed. They know which side their butter is breaded on.