A clamping company has apologised for an incident where its staff clamped two cars outside a doctor's surgery in Galway during a medical emergency.
Control Plus, the company contracted by Galway City Council, has also said that it is carrying out an internal review of the circumstances surrounding the incident, which occurred on the Crescent near the city centre last Saturday.
One of the two staff members involved has been assigned to office duties as a matter of course, but not as a disciplinary measure, the company said yesterday.
Mr Neil Cunningham, managing director of Control Plus, told The Irish Times that there was an "error of judgment" by its staff in relation to the "doctor on call" badge on the doctor's car, and "whether it was genuine or not". He said that Galway City Council had instructed it not to recognise "doctor on call" signs on cars, as they were not exempt from the city's parking rules and by-laws.
Both cars were parked in spaces reserved for drivers with disabilities, and neither vehicle carried the EU-recognised disabled parking sticker.
The staff had clamped the doctor's car, and that of the father of an eight-year-old child who was showing symptoms of meningitis and needed to be transferred to University College Hospital, Galway, at 8.46 a.m. last Saturday. The clamps were released only when a garda, who was called to the scene, agreed to pay the release fee.
Mr Michael Mannion had called to the surgery with the child and had received a letter from the doctor on duty to take the child to hospital. When he came out, both cars were clamped. He had no money with him as it was an emergency, and the clamping staff also ignored the doctor's request to remove the clamps.
When the gardaí also arrived, the staff member still refused until a garda gave him his own banker's card. The doctor wrote a cheque to have her own vehicle released. "The man kept the card and went over to the van and started to process all the paperwork, and still left us sitting there," Mr Mannion said. He and his child did not reach the hospital until after 9.30 a.m., some 45 minutes later. Fortunately, the eight-year-old did not have meningitis.
The Control Plus managing director said that the two cars had been clamped in "good faith" and the doctor had paid her clamping release fee before the gardaí arrived. "It is a lot clearer now what the facts were than what they were at the scene at the time, and our people are seriously embarrassed by the situation," Mr Cunningham said yesterday.
"The crew that we had out on Saturday morning are presented with these sorts of scenarios on a regular basis. Some are genuine, the vast majority are not genuine," he said.
Mr Cunningham said that all the staff were thoroughly trained under a two-week programme which dealt with customer care and aggression, before being sent out on the street.