Fun, fitness and fashion? On yer bike

IT’S 30 years, and the last deep recession/depression, since the then-British conservative MP Norman Tebbit effectively urged Britain’s unemployed to ‘Get on yer bike’, and go look for work instead of rioting.

For the last nine days, bike action, and peaceful riots of colour, worked to take over Cork city’s streets during the Cork Cycling Festival, an almost random gathering of bike-based activities and art events which has gathered pace and a happy momentum over the past four years.

It has helped reclaim the roads for cyclists, boosting cycling’s profile and efficacy, in a range of bespoke bikes, trikes and unicycles. It has also done it in clothing and garb as varied as high fashion, in protective skirts made from upcycled tents salvaged from Oxegen, in Edwardian era-garb on retro High Nellies, as well as in simply sensible high-viz day-glo colours: plus, of course, in naked Irish flesh, laid bare, proud to be pink, white and mottled blue.

Last week’s Cork city naked bike ride grabbed media and passers-by attention but different events also put bikes to the fore.

Bikes are back with a bang. In the capital, the scheme Dublin Bikes has made available 500 sturdy rental bikes from 44 pick-up/drop-off stations to anyone who want to sign up for their cheap usage. Despite the cynics who predicted they’d all end up chucked in the Liffey, the scheme has thrived, and has encouraged thousands more in Dublin to get back on their own bikes and to reclaim the free-wheeling days of cheap transport.

Compared to Dublin’s fairly flat city terrain, Cork city’s rim of hills might demand a bit more pedal power to get about: maybe that’s why electric bikes are slowing gaining traction among the chattering classes, the more weak-kneed or elderly — or, simply, those living up a hill.

And, in Co Limerick, a company called Go Eco has started electric bike rentals for touring.

Although pedal purists might sniff a bit, electric bikes are smart, light on the environment — and you don’t end up in fog of perspiration after a hilly encounter.

Those in the new wave of Irish cycling, whirring by on racing bikes must sweat a bit — or does Lycra whisk it away, among its other talents? If there’s been a revolution in Irishmen’s dress sense and willingness to experiment with colour, it must be down to light 21-speed racers. Ireland finally has embraced long-distance cycling and racing, almost a generation after Stephen Roche and Sean Kelly and tight coterie broke from the grey pack of work-a-day cyclists, to worldwide recognition.

For whatever reason, road racing/endurance training has belatedly come in the slipstream of such Irish cycling stars. It might be simply the rise in fitness options, the demands of triathlons, or doctor’s orders, aided and abetted by German discount supermarkets selling high-spec bikes at modest prices. Full pelotons of Lycra-clad men (and some women) in a palette of primary colours, are now a regular feature on Irish country roads, a welcome blaze of activity that’s surely going to be more than a passing trend.

The bike scene in Ireland is fragmented, but happily so. For every star-to-be in Spandex, there’s another off up a hill, a mountain or on a forest trail revelling in the controlled risk that is mountain-biking. Going full pelt downhill on a track is still as exciting as your first-ever freewheel down a hill as a child, experiencing the freedom a bike can bring.

Children’s bike days in Ireland are, largely, different to previous decades. Increased road congestion, faster car speeds, and the juggernaut of passing trucks will deter all but the most committed parents from encouraging children to cycle to school, to friends, to play and sports areas, to beaches. Shame on us.

Who remembers the charity walks and cycle challenges of a few decades ago? Cork led an annual charge of hundreds, if not thousands, of juvenile cyclists each year in a trip to Kinsale from Cork city, starting and ending at the CMP dairy by Turners Cross: the 40-mile round trip was a summer breeze, and you did it on the same bike you used for getting to school the rest of the year.

As recently as 1986, 7% of us used bikes daily as a commute option: by 2006, that figure had dropped below 2%. A 2009 government strategy document National Cycling Policy Framework aims to get the figure back up to 10% by 2020, and follows the lead of advocacy group cycle.ie in promoting safe cycling to school as a viable option (most Irish children live within 3-4 miles of their schools).

The need for action is significant: the number of Irish children cycling to school plummeted from 23,000 in 1986 to just over 4,000 by 2006. Childhood obesity has risen in tandem.

The recession might yet just do us all a favour, by reversing those depressing spirals. On Yer Bike.