Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The reason I tabled this amendment is because sharp practice is also practised by public bodies which use clampers. It is not just the private management companies, although I would have liked the Minister to take much stronger action against them earlier on. I think Dublin City Council is the only local authority that uses clamping. An article in The Irish Times stated that Dublin City Council set a target of 60,000 vehicles for clampers so the company doing the clamping is actually setting a target. If 60,000 vehicles are clamped in Dublin that year, the company offered to pay staff a bonus of €2,000 each. If the overall target was not met, only individual clampers who managed to clamp 2,800 vehicles per year would be rewarded. The Minister can see the aim is not to manage traffic but to clamp people at all costs. This is a private company operating on behalf of a local authority - a statutory agency. Clampers can apparently leave a ten-hour shift after 8.5 hours if they have clamped 21 vehicles. In a letter to staff, the company's management while working for a public body said that the council was not happy with the number of clampings in 2012 and that the company was expected to deliver approximately 60,000 clampings in 2012 but only delivered 54,000.

This shows how public bodies are subcontracting to private companies, some of which do not file accounts and operate offshore. They are also putting huge pressure on staff to clamp. We have all had the experience of being clamped after being one minute or two minutes late. We know that Merrion Square, which is right behind us, is a hotspot. It is purely for this reason and not to regulate traffic flow. That was the reason I asked the Minister to extend it to public bodies who use clampers.

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