Just park yourself here

The services sector has been badly hit by labour shortages, as we all know, but few professions have suffered as much as that of the so-called "men with peaked caps".

There are still a few around in Dublin, even if casualisation means many of them don't wear caps any more. But there are large areas of the city centre now bereft, and this once-flourishing trade increasingly seems a thing of the past.

For younger readers and others not familiar with the phenomenon, the "peaked caps" were and to an extent remain, basically, middle-men; who in return for a fee provided clients - in this case motorists attempting to park cars - with advice on how to achieve their goal.

Typically, the service included first attracting the customer's attention to a parking space, often using theatrical gestures that suggested the driver alone would never have spotted it, even if it the space was the size of a five-a-side soccer pitch.

Then, crucially, the parking attendant would provide loud advice on how to manoeuvre the vehicle into the space, invariably including directions to "Lock hard! Lock hard!". He would do this even, as I say, if the area involved was so big you could park the Belfast Agreement in it.

Although it was rarely spoken of, the service also traditionally included an insurance element, which meant that for no extra cost the attendant covered the car against any accidents that might otherwise occur, as illustrated by this popular 1970s joke:

Parking attendant to driver locking vehicle: "Would you like me to mind your car?"

Motorist (pointing to Alsatian dog in back seat): "No, that won't be necessary."

Parking attendant to back of retreating driver: "Does your dog put out fires?"

It may be a bit premature to be referring to them in the past tense like this. But certainly, the men in caps are nowhere near as prevalent as they were in their heyday; when you couldn't swing a cat in the city centre without attracting their advice ("Swing her in there," they'd say).

They were so widespread in the early 1980s that it looked like they might soon have to diversify into other areas, such as finding people tables in busy cafes (not a bad idea, come to think of it. In keeping with tradition, they could then have advised people how to sit down: "Bend your knees . . . that's right . . . now lock hard! Lock hard!")

This was an era when some city parking franchises must have been nearly as valuable as taxi-plates, and they were probably passed from father to son, or else won in turf wars, involving drive-by shootings and so on. Maybe there was some sort of overall peaked cap somewhere, a sort of capo di tutti capi, co-ordinating the whole thing.

But these days, there are only a handful of cap men left, and those that remain tend to have an apologetic appearance, with often no pretence of a uniform, and a reluctance to use the phrase "lock hard" unless you ask specially.

No doubt some of the leading parking attendants quit to set up their own consultancy businesses, perhaps giving lessons in hard neck to Dublin county councillors and the like, or maybe just advising corporate Ireland on how to find on-street parking. This last possibility would explain why in certain prime business areas of Dublin, you never see a vacant space. You may occasionally notice there's a different car in a space than there was last time you looked, but you won't see the switch being made.

Maybe people are posting the information on the Internet. But I suspect that parking spaces are now being handed on from father to son, or at any rate shared between small secretive groups such as the Freemasons, who co-ordinate their movements by mobile phone to ensure the spaces never fall into the hands of strangers.

The irony is that, once considered a nuisance, the peaked caps could be providing a premium service these days, when the unassisted motorist could find Shergar quicker than a legal parking space in Dublin. Indeed, I believe there's room for a full on-street valet service, based on my experience last week - on Good Friday no less - of trying to find a parking space within half a mile of the office.

There were major road works in the city centre, presumably on the grounds that nobody would be out on Good Friday. Which is what I thought too; only to find that it was like rush-hour on Spaghetti Junction and driving around in it for 20 minutes was like doing the Stations of the Cross, without the religious experience.

There were no peaked caps to be seen, needless to say. But I swear if I'd spotted one anywhere, I'd have jumped out and handed him the keys. "Park it where you can," I'd have told him, "I'll find it later."

Email: fmcnally@irish-times.ie