How desperate, or - perhaps more pertinently - how arrogant and selfish would you have to be, to park your car illegally on MacCurtain Street?

I don’t mean pulling momentarily in to pick up a friend in the rain, or waiting a few seconds to collect someone who had just seen a show at the Everyman.

I mean to park your car on a footpath or at a bus stop on the street, get out, and saunter away without a care in the world to do whatever business brought you there, perhaps for 15 or 30 minutes, or even for a few hours.

The answer is, you would have to have a neck like the nether regions of a male jockey after a particularly arduous race at Cheltenham.

But it happens frequently, every day, to the extent that a pilot scheme last winter aimed at tackling out-of-hours parking infringements in Cork city found that nearly half of the fines issued were for MacCurtain Street.

Of 368 Fixed Charge Notices handed out on Sundays during the pilot, 150 (41%) were for offences on the recently-revamped city thoroughfare, and of the 101 notices handed out in the evenings, 59 (58%) were issued there.

Illegal parking has blighted the street since it was renovated, despite a car park literally being situated there, as well as legal off-street parking bays in the immediate vicinity.

Councillors, and pedestrian and disability advocates are consistently highlighting the issue, to little avail. The street’s traders are also annoyed when there is no space for their deliveries to be made.

But still a significant quota of selfish and arrogant motorists insist on parking on MacCurtain Street.

So bad has the problem become in Cork, that........

© Evening Echo