Parking with Flann O’Brien
The country is at last in thrall to the beauty of golden spring days, buds are back waiting for their bees, and all seems right in Ireland lately. Well, almost.
The civil servants, who have suffered their pay cuts, are remaining grumpy and prone to an odd form of magical thinking, which is that if they irritate the populace thoroughly enough everyone will side with them and an exascerbated goverment will top up their pay just like the blissful days of yore. The stunts in the central Dublin passport office were well advertised — the staff began shuffling papers and walking around teapots in aimless circles like the Undead. Result: 50,000 applicants were denied their basic right to travel abroad and left stranded for a small eternity, with endless, angry queues forming outside the door of the Brain Dead.
What has not come to the world’s attention is the parking situation in Ireland, always bizarre, has now gone utterly mad. The deal is that if you run overtime for a few minutes, you incurr not a $25 fine but one three times that. If you are say an hour or two late, you get your tires clamped and immobolized with a kind of wide-jawed medieval torture device and then they tow you away, ha, ha, hee, hee to the tune of about 150 euros. I watched busy preparations for that form of hell on eight cars in fifteen minutes on a Cork street today, so desperate is the government for revenue.
But these in their Thomas the Tank hat guys don’t play fair. If your annual resident’s parking permit is a day late, you’re screwed. However, the civil “servants” in charge of issuing those are doing another retaliation number on the general public, or somebody, and in Cork at least, issuing none. Now Ireland is a connoisseur’s delight of anarchy at the best of times. But at the moment we are being served up mad hatter chaos. Is this country real, or did a writer write it into being?
Meanwhile, our local Cork intersection that sucked up a million euros in late boom funding to become a model of an urban village with esplanades and gleaming new traffic lights has steathily had a kind of City Council sleepinng bag or balaclava stuck on every stop-and -go light’s business end. So therefore, they do nothing, and the chaos is back to normal, which means worse.
Ah spring!
Hilarious and terriffic writing David, as always. When I return, I will be thoroughly paranoid with the rental car. “Is this country real, or did a writer write it into being?” You certainly know the answer.