Dublin Cycling Campaign brought the promotion and facilitation of cycling to another big Dublin festival over last weekend.

We were out at the City Council’s Rose Festival, supervising the bike parking area, chatting to everyone we could meet about the benefits of having a strong cycling campaign body active in Dublin, and giving out free bike goodies!

The Festival is an annual tribute to the Rose Gardens in St. Anne’s Park, Raheny and sees an attendance in the many thousands. Music, food trucks, kids’ entertainments and gardening advice are on offer and the whole thing is a worthy celebration of this awesome park, the pride of the northside.

Hundreds of people turned up seeking parking for a plethora of different kinds of bikes, from balance bikes for toddlers to multi-person, electric cargo bikes.

A host of brilliant Campaign volunteers helped with cycling advice, recruited new members, and boosted the visibility and practicality of cycling for a whole new audience. Our incredibly together organiser Aisling Jones said, “This is just brilliant – to help encourage so many people to come to the Festival by bike, and to raise the profile and status of cycling by offering a proper, well laid out parking facility. It’s all part of the normalisation of cycling as a serious mode of daily transport”.

A highlight was the visit by the Monthly Cycles crew on Sunday. See here for more info.

The City Council’s Parks Department were hugely impressed with the numbers of bikes turning up, even in Sunday’s rain, and we’ll be looking to do even more next year! Thanks to all our incredible volunteers for all the meitheal - especially Aisling and Paul McDermott, and to the hard-working Ciarán Kavanagh in the Parks Department and Site Manager Brian McMahon.