I came to Dublin to learn English in 1996, and Ireland has never really left me since

I first came to Dublin to learn English for a couple of weeks as a teenager in the summer of 1996, and Ireland has never really left me since.

I returned as an Erasmus student and this is when I met my wife. Fast-forward some 25 odd years and you have an Irishwoman living abroad with a Frenchman and three Franco-Irish kids.

My wife reads the French mindset like the back of her hand and yet remains viscerally connected to Ireland. I am also drawn to Ireland, but probably feel most comfortable among the Irish diaspora. Many Irish friends living in Paris show the same curiosity for France as I have for Ireland and we enjoy remembering Ireland together and reimagining it.

My own sense of Irishness is less an inheritance than a craft and I have made it my way of life by teaching Irish history and literature to French students. Learning about Irish culture and playing Irish music are ways of expressing my sense of Irishness. And so is cycling.

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When we relocated to Dublin for two years in 2023, I joined the cycling section of the Kilmacud Crokes GAA club in Stillorgan. Here I met extremely kind and welcoming people with a great sense of humour.

Thanks to them I became more familiar with the back roads of the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains, and also expanded my knowledge of local history: spotting O’Connell’s rock on the road between Tibradden and Glencullen, imagining the villages of Baltyboys and Ballinahown buried at the bottom of the Blessington lakes, learning about the 1976 train robbery when passing by Sallins.

Every two years, the KC Wheelers cycle across Ireland from Mizen Head to Malin Head (M2M) to raise funds for Breast Cancer Ireland. I first came to Ireland at an age when most youths feel life is just a long summer that will never end. I am now at an age that I have seen friends survive or lose their lives to cancer. The cycle is way of acknowledging this. It is also a personal challenge, to see inside hidden Ireland and earn my cycling stripes.

The Mizen to Malin cycle exceeded all my expectations. Every day had its own character: its own route, its own gradient, its own weather. The roads from Mizen Head to Glengarriff as well as the Caha Pass and Moll’s Gap (which we climbed in sweltering heat) were absolutely stunning.

Some stretches lent themselves to a more leisurely pace and to plenty of banter. Others less so, as I discovered along the plains of Offaly when we rode flat out along the N62. The Royal Canal greenway, 25km from Ballymahon to Cloondara, was simply gorgeous.

Our fourth stage was one of these dusky days in Ireland where the sky forgot to lift. Dark clouds poured solid rain over us for the whole 145km from Carrick-on-Shannon to Letterkenny as we went through boreens and climbed up 1500m.

After all this cycling, our final stage seemed like half-a-stage with only 80km to cover. We crested hills and descended over the bog from Carndonagh to Malin. It was absolutely spectacular.

Many of the KC wheelers were not just great cyclists but consummate singers too. I discovered this on day two at Shane MacGowan mural in Nenagh (home of my in-laws) as they belted out Rainy Night in Soho. And this was only the start of the singing.

I am a desperate singer but eventually there was no avoiding it. I gave a rendition of French singer Claude Nougaro’s ode to Toulouse both the singer’s and my hometown.

It’s also Trevor Brennan’s home and I hoped the Leinster lads would enjoy the nod to the Leinster -Toulouse icon: “How far away my homeland, how far away. Sometimes deep within me stirs the green waters of the Canal du Midi and the red bricks of the ‘Minimes’ neighbourhood.”

I have now returned to Paris, where my family moved last September.

But I’ve kept many stories with me of the characters we met: like the posse of English ladies on a hen party at a Ballymahon petrol station, and the schoolkids and teachers who all cheered as we passed.

Hopefully some day, when my own kids are big and strong, they will take their old man cycling through their homeland.

To take Louis MacNeice’s lines about Dublin and stretch them to Ireland as a whole: “I was not born nor bred, nor schooled here and she will not, have me alive or dead. But yet she holds my mind.” And I will be back for more. Before that, though, I am hoping some of the Irish cyclists will come to France and climb the Mont Ventoux with me.

François Sablayrolles lives in Paris with his Irish wife and Franco-Irish children. He is a lecturer in British and Irish studies at the University of Angers. His cycle was raising funds for Breast Cancer Ireland, a donation page can be found here.

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