I have always been skeptical of authority. I was a rebellious youth who grew to become a skeptical adult.

I have at times assumed that this was an Irish trait. Indeed the Irish do seem to have a healthy skepticism towards authority. That is why I particularly enjoyed the photograph, shown at the top of a page, of a young man at Trinity College ignoring four rules at once.

Irish skepticism may originate from the Celtic era. The clans did have chiefs and elders, but they were not always held in awe. An Irish man or woman could always tell the chief to bugger off. More likely this skepticism came from centuries of the Irish living under English rule.

I saw a classic example of this on a recent trip to Ireland. I was in a small village and wanted to stop for one reason or another. On this village street, it meant that I needed to parallel park.

I am a good driver and can parallel park with no sweat in the United States. It took a bit more concentration to do it in Ireland. Since the Irish drive on the left side of the road, I needed to parallel park on the left side. I could not rely on muscle memory to do this. I had to focus a bit, but I got it done.

I got out of the car, looked about, and realized my parking was perfect. I nailed it and was a bit proud of myself.

I then noticed another car coming towards me. The car was heading in the opposite direction and thus was in the other lane. There weren’t any parking spots on his side of the road, and there weren’t any on my side either. So he drove off of his lane, across the lane onto my side of the road, and onto the sidewalk. With his car safely on the sidewalk, he got out of his car and went into a nearby store. To him, all was good.

It immediately reminded me of my favorite line in Pirates of the Caribbean. When talking about the pirate’s code, the pirate admitted that the code is more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

I didn’t take a photograph of this guy’s parking job. The photos on this page are from a new favorite Facebook page, called Bad Parking Ireland.

Upon reflection, the parking shown on this page may not be the work of authority skeptics. It may simply be examples of bad parking.