Anyone who has had a medical appointment at Mater Dei Hospital in the morning or who has visited a patient during the midday visiting hours knows very well the difficulty of trying to find a place to park in the car park.

But there is something drastically wrong in the scene of dozens of illegally parked cars.

There appears to be a scheme in place which amounts to theft by stealth. I suspect G4S personnel will let you in knowing only too well that the car park is well over its capacity and then your car will be clamped, requiring €35 to release it.

Furthermore, staff at G4S seem to interpret what is legal and what is not in a different way to the norm. Legal parking in a car park is only between the white lines but one officer of G4S, who bluntly refused to give me his name, disagreed. He seems to think that some illegal parking is permitted and some of it is not.

With this sort of practice, how is anyone supposed to know what is illegal parking and what isn’t, especially when no signage is available.

I urge the minister responsible to act by making sure the flood of cars entering the car park and the subsequent clamping is stopped. This is unconscionable and most probably illegal.