I should perhaps have suspected something when in Rathmines Library one day a while ago I saw an earnest chap from the corporation presiding over a colour keyed ordnance map of the area.
With an imaginary wand, he indicated details of a grand strategic plan. Standing by the easel he listened attentively to civilian intelligence, delivered sotto voce passing on observations and worries about the enemy traffic.
We had already had the "do you want disc parking in your area?" questionnaire and answered yes. Local TDs Michael McDowell, Frances Fitzgerald, and Eoin Ryan had also becomingly circulated us as if they, single handedly, were going to deliver the discs.
Guerrilla parking
Before their advent we vied to park (illegally) with two wheels on the footpath opposite and life went on in its usual quotidian, untidy, semi ruly way. We had cat and mouse guerrilla parking. Nor was the restricted footpath efficacious for buggy people, and their carers.
But the corpo official in the library now put it all in context. Disc parking wasn't really about giving residents somewhere to park, legally. (This was later underlined by deafness to a suggestion that several more spaces could easily be provided for residents, whose £20 a year affords only slightly better odds on being able to find a legal disc space.)
Our disc parking was about "traffic calming", pacification. A new war of attrition against the motorist was afoot.
Fair enough. Sounded great, sensitive to the area even. But what none of us residents knew then was that this would end up in a raid on our well worn and weathered Wicklow granite kerbstones and Worse.
Six riot or crowd control type barriers the kind of thing they bring out for visiting Clintons and lager louts now line at seven foot intervals, the edge of a dazzlingly bright concrete footpath, where a trowel has cut us a mere facsimile of the old granite look. Big ignorant farm gates, not even as pleasing as those our Frank McDonald has called the "sheep pens" that restrain would be wayfarers into O'Connell Bridge's motorised confluence.
Oh no. The thinking is "anything will do" for Mount Pleasant Avenue, it has transpired.
The six rails, allegedly for safety, had surely been put on the wrong lorry and should have been planted along some dual carriageway, where their ugliness would have fitted in well with the utilitarian scape? The feeling now in this part of a street line, drawn for the horse and lder than the Grand Canal, is of an urban motorway.
Mechanical mammoth
The corporation's surprise attack came early on a recent Friday when a mechanical mammoth gobbled up the pavement and made off. Roused, from sleep, it reminded me of the merry mayhem wrought by water mains improvers last year
(That gang had replaced perfectly serviceable, and pleasing, horse shoe shaped mains stopcock covers with boring square efforts, for some inscrutable reason that could surely have nothing to do with saving on the budget or with aesthetic values.)
Very early on the Monday as I reasoned on the phone with a loquacious but implacable Brendan Kelly, head of the Maintenance Department, cement was a pouring outside to secure forever the deeply buried galvanised iron roots of these on the cheap monstrosities.
He preferred to say "economical", not cheap. "I like the granite too," he had begun ingenuously, "but unfortunately it is a luxury we can't afford any more. " He went on to explain that any of it the corpo came by was used "elsewhere".
I'm told the trade term for this is "mining". The kerb in front of my front door is preparing for a new life perhaps in St Stephen's Green or Temple Bar, I suspect, where proper people like tourists can get the benefit of it.
But the cement was still wet as he spoke. An urban guerrilla would have set about the barricades with heart and might before they became the fixtures they seem today. The supine constitutional route has, of course, prevailed. Now all this railing against railings is not just about devaluing property. But it's that too.
A Load of Bollards
Bollards. Bollards. Bollards!
Like the fluted yokes where the tourist and the EU limousine ply. That's what we want, not farm gates, a strategic offensive doorstep conference had already resolved. At £200 each, an impecunious Dublin Corporation couldn't afford them (for us), I was told.
Reading the mind of the officers in the riverside Civic Offices bunker is, of course, the realm problem. I have searched the annals of the area. Tod Andrews closed our Harcourt Street line in a 1959 campaign because of an aversion to solicitors and stock brokers in Carrickmines.
But what could be officialdom's real agenda here? Franz Kafka, thou shouldst be living at this hour. Or Michael McDowell and Co for that matter. Where are you now that you're needed? Now that the ramifications of a cheap solution looks more of an aesthetic travesty" than the original problem ever was.
But as an astoundingly temperate residents' letter to the new City Manager, Mr Johns Fitzgerald (of whom much is hoped) to the Chief Executive of Roads, Streets and Traffic and to Maintenance points out, actually there wasn't an original problem to be solved at all.
Bollards to railings
When disc parking first narrowed the thoroughfare the odd impatient opportunist, crazed like that vintage model of "road rage", Toad of Toad Hall, did indeed mount the pavement to pass oncoming traffic.
But since then traffic has calmed a corporation success story corporate minds, apparently, just could not leave alone. Drivers have learned to wait patiently for their turn to pass in the narrowed circumstances. An etiquette has developed. In any case the new raised footpath is more difficult to mount.
Most of the damage to the kerbs was done over time in the old days (and had long escaped the kind attentions of Mr Kelly's Maintenance Department, until now).
But Mr Kelly provided a perhaps inadvertent, revelation. Something to the effect that he himself didn't approve of disc parking anyway. Discs were Roads, Streets & Traffic's dream. Wasn't his idea. This conjured a picture of corpo divisions locked in internecine warfare on the battlefield of Mount Pleasant. We, victims of this apparent corporate days functionalism, want our granite back and need neither farm gates nor bollards. We call that "economical" . Bollards to railings! The water pressure is great now though, thank you, Waterworks Department.