Sport Ireland hosted the event in Dublin’s Chester Beatty Library

Dublin Cycling Campaign took part in the ‘Get Ireland Cycling’ stakeholder consultation on Tuesday 6th March this week. The event, hosted by Sport Ireland, is an initiative from Healthy Ireland which links to its ‘Get Ireland Walking’ project which has been running for a number of years.

The consultation was attended by approx 70 people including cycling advocates and representatives from local & national government agencies such as the Department of Transport, Local Sports Partnerships, and An Garda Síochána. The event consisted of talks from cycling experts and workshops which focused on how to develop a strategy to ‘Get Ireland Cycling’.

The speakers at the event included Angela van der Kloof from Dutch consultancy Mobycon (pictured above), who spoke about how the Netherlands developed its cycling culture. Dr. Damien Ó Tuama gave an outline of where cycling is at in Ireland at the moment. Jane Hackett of An Taisce Green Schools spoke about progress that has been made in developing cycling and walking routes to schools while her colleague Róisín Garvey filled us in on some of the cycling training initiatives that are underway across the country. Clare Sports Partnership told us about the success they had in developing the An Post Cycle Series and how it boosted numbers participating in local cycling sportifs.

The workshops generated plenty of discussions and debates about how cycling can be progressed and what potential strategies can be employed to Get Ireland Cycling. The general impression coming away from the event was that there are a lot of enthusiastic people working to develop cycling in Ireland, but that without a cycling coordinator, operating at a national level, it will be difficult to tie all these different initiatives together.

It is expected that future workshops and public consultations will develop from this initial stakeholder consultation so watch this space!