Mullingar rain causing parking ticket pain

If you have been wondering why you can't get one of the two parking metres at the front of Mullingar train station to print you out a ticket and why you have run to the machine at the far end of the site, well here is the cause: the Irish weather.The machines at the stations can't cope with the rain and frost and when there is no sun in the sky the paper in the solar-powered meters gets stuck. If you don't display a ticket on your car, you could find the vehicle clamped - and have to fork out €120 to get it freed.A worker at the station said this week that he had been taking keys from people and putting tickets on their cars to stop them being clamped."People never leave extra time when they are going for a train," said the worker. "They don't know that there is another machine behind the green fence where the CIE buses park and they are furious when I tell them that they will have to go all the way up to get a ticket."Often they would miss the train and I say to them look just give me the keys and I'll get you a ticket because I wouldn't see them having to take that sort of a fine."They are fixed at the minute but odds on they will break again and it will be days of pleading to get someone down here to fix them. Commuters get especially annoyed because they never have time to run all the way over to the other machine and again most of them don't know where the machine is."