EMISSIONS/Kilian Doyle: Everyone hates clampers, right? We all despise them for roving in packs like hunting dogs, choosing their victims with an uncanny knack of picking the motorist who desperately, madly, deeply cannot do without their car that day or the driver whose financial position would make Argentina weep with despair?
Or the way they derive childish buzzes from carting off expensive sports cars and €50,000 jeeps?
Who can forget the public admiration for the motorist who evaded their evil clutches by getting creative with his jack and driving off on his spare, abandoning the clamp to its futile embrace of the discarded wheel? Or the folk-hero status of the woman who steadfastly took on Galway County Council over her refusal to pay a €60 fine for parking in her native city?
Well, not quite everyone hates them. Emissions doesn't. It's not that he necessarily admires their vindictive streaks or their obvious glee in fecking people's days up. Nor does he wish to know any of them personally - rather, he regards them as petty power-trippers who would be dangerous if they had any real authority. Imagine the carnage if they all fulfilled their deepest, darkest desires and became gardaí or bouncers?
No, he loves them because they are the embodiment of how successions of disastrous plans are rapidly bringing the Irish transport system to its knees. In a country with one of the world's fastest growing economies, why are there commuters spending four hours a day trapped in their cars for lack of a decent road system or public transport network? And once they get to work, why must they be presented with the option of either paying exorbitant parking rates or risking the wrath of these misery merchants with their little vans and bad attitudes?
Car ownership in Ireland, at 31 per cent, is lower than most of our EU neighbours. But cities like Brussels with its glorious underground roads, and London with its Tube can manage to function as living, breathing entities, unlike the clogged, tar-coated arteries of Dublin, Cork, Limerick or Galway. And just try living in Enfield or Kinnegad or Drogheda.
The drivers aren't to blame, for that rests on the planners and their lack of forward vision and inability to adapt to Ireland's maturation into a modern society, for all its ills.
So stand up and be proud, Mr Clamper Man, for you are the catalyst for the revolution! Eventually, you will anger enough people often enough for their communal rage to explode into an irresistible force that the powers-that-be can no longer silence with the threat of a €100 fine or a trip to the car pound.
And finally, Emissions has a confession to make. He also loves them for the vicarious glee he enjoyed whilst watching four of them guffawing as they lifted an illegally parked Ferrari out of a cycle lane, drenched as he was after pedalling through a July thunderstorm.
What greater satisfaction could he have derived than to watch the top of the vehicular food chain being punished for getting in his way? His job application is in the post . . .
kdoyle@irish-times.com