Last Saturday, Dublin Cycling Campaign was at the 2026 Harold’s Cross Festival.

This community run festival takes place in the lovely, long and narrow, Council owned park that sits between the two arms of Harold’s Cross Road. The whole festival ran over Saturday and Sunday, 23-24 May.

Helping out at the Dublin Cycling Campaign gazebo were our active members Siobhán, Miren, Shane, Sandra and Damien. It was a nice opportunity to chat to some of the many festival goers who arrived by bike about our vision for the city and the work we are doing to realise it. It was particularly striking how many cargo bikes, and bikes with baby seats, were dotted around the park and tied to the perimeter railings.

We chatted with and listened to many festival goers who stopped by our space about the urgent need to make Harold’s Cross Road itself more cycle friendly – the slow pace of advancing the Bus Connects schemes is a source of frustration – and more generally for road surfaces to be improved. The problem of bike theft in the city centre, and particularly more expensive e-bikes, was raised more than once.

We bumped into several of our existing members and indeed some old friends of the Campaign going back to the 1990s, and we hope that many more we chatted to will join Irish Cycling Campaign (of which Dublin Cycling Campaign is the local branch). More members means we have an even bigger mandate and we make more of an impact on public policy and practice.

You can read more about Harold’s Cross Festival here and we see from the ‘Previous Festivals’ tab that the 2026 festival is its 14th edition. We assumed that this was Dublin Cycling Campaign’s first time at the HX Festival, but then we spotted this photograph from the 2014 edition so some of our Campaign colleagues must have been flying the Campaign flag back then too!

A sincere thank you to Tony McDermott and his colleagues from the HX Festival for the warm welcome and support on the day. We hope we can be back again on another occasion.