Cycling features in St Patrick’s Day parades around the country

Cycling is usually a feature of the end of Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade, but, this year, cycling has featured in a number of parades around the country, with some quite funny entries.

The group from the Dublin Cycling Campaign at the end of the capital’s parade had a Joycean theme, in keeping with the generally more serious parade in Dublin:

The real capital, Cork City, added a bit more noise with BikeBop does Paddy’s Day:

In the year or two supporters of cycling and sustainable transport are more often saying there’s public consultation fatigue, due to the number of public consultations processing being held.

But the prevalence of public consultation has reached a new peak today after featuring in the parade in the village of Moycullen in Co Galway.

The people of Moycullen seem to mostly want the Connemara Greenway to progress. Signs showing the details of the Galway to Oughterard public consultation even featured as part of their parade… although, it’s not exactly clear what was happening on or around the Connemara Greenway float in the parade… maybe a clash between supporters and protesters?

Another village in Galway, gCeathrú Rua (Carraroe), featured an even stranger event… an unofficial reenactment of one of the strangest cycling-related viral videos where a van driver and a cargo bicycle cyclist have a full-blown argument in the Irish language.

To be clear for our international readers: Irish is not spoken widely in Ireland. The Central Statistics Office puts the level of daily use of the language outside the education systems as just 1.7% of the population.

So, that’s why what is thought to be the first-ever recorded argument between a cyclist and a motorist (a white van driver) was all the more surreal when both had a war of words in Irish.

Cycling also featured heavily in parades in the Fingal area of Co Dublin;

The message in the coastal town of Skerries in Co Dublin could not be clearer:

And, also in Fingal, cycling featured in the parade in Swords, Co Dublin too:

Not to be left out there was a bit of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown area too in the Stepaside parade:

There was also a cycling contingent in Westport, Co Mayo: