I gave Dublinbikes a bum rap, now I fear it'll give me one

EMISSIONS:The popularity of Dublinbikes only goes to show how clever a conspiracy it really is

APPARENTLY, IT takes a big man to admit he’s wrong in public. I say apparently because, not being a big man, I wouldn’t know.

So I’m not going to stand up and give it the old mea culpa spiel. But I am, through teeth as gritted as an icebound motorway, prepared to confess that I may have misjudged a situation somewhat.

I refer, of course, to the Dublinbikes scheme.

You may remember I took a jaunt on one of these contraptions the day it launched and returned, ashen-faced, to Emissions Towers to bash out a tirade about how rubbish the bikes were and how I’d happily bet your house on most of them ending up in the Liffey, the victims of insolent street urchins and inebriated oiks.

I decried them as unsafe, uncool and uncomfortable before bravely predicting the only people who’d welcome them would be ambulance- chasing personal injuries lawyers.

Well, whaddya know, my prediction on the last bit was as accurate as Napoleon’s claim he’d be swanning around the Kremlin in time for Christmas.

Turns out the good people of the capital have taken to them like the proverbial duck to water. So much so that 23,000 people signed up in the first three months. Not that they’re getting out much in these current Baltic conditions, where cruising around frozen streets on a bike is as hazardous as swimming with piranhas in a bikini made of lamb’s liver. (Speaking of which, why are icy roads described as “treacherous”? Is it because they’re covered in lying snow?)

The evidence of the public’s love affair with these yokes hit me like a crossbar to the goolies. I’d evidently underestimated the attraction by a considerable margin.

But will it make me join the pedalling hordes? Nope. But that’s not because, as I still maintain, they are slow and have steering as wobbly as a deboned cobra. Nor is it because you look a prize ponce riding one. Rather, I will resist because I refuse to become a tool of The Man.

Allow me to elucidate. I am an avid, possibly rabid, fan of Flann O’Brien and his bizarre wheezes. The atomic theory, as espoused in The Third Policeman, is a particular favourite. This, as you are aware, is the postulation that habitual cyclists are rendered part-bicycle, and their bicycles part-human, by the “interchanging of atoms” that occurs between buttock and saddle.

I have my suspicions that Dublin City Council (DCC) is aware of this theory and has connived a plot to employ it for its own nefarious purposes.

The council, like everyone else, is facing cutbacks. Belts must be tightened. Wage bills must be slashed. What better way to do it than cajole the unwitting public into doing the work of their staff, thus enabling them to decimate their workforce ruthlessly?

But how to do it? By offering the good people of their city a cheap and handy form of transport, namely the bicycle, of course.

Cunningly, Dublinbikes are no ordinary rothars. They have been specially impregnated with pure high-grade DCC atoms. What’s more, they’ve been made to be deliberately rickety and skittery to maximise the exchange of particles.

Mark my words: in no time, those 23,000 happy cyclists will be half council worker, whether they know it or not. Without knowing why, they’ll be hopping off mid-journey to fill potholes, sweep streets, clear blocked drains and scrub graffiti.

They will be mindless pawns. Meanwhile, all the wicked DCC masterminds have to do is sit back and admire their work as the productivity soars and wage bills plummet.