PRESENT TENSE:If Green Party TDs meet catastrophe today, they will probably ride into the sunset on a bike, writes
SHANE HEGARTY
IT’S THE WEEKEND: have you seen your father in Lycra yet today? Has he wandered down the hall in an all-in-one cycling bib, not caring for your sniggers, knowing that soon he will be happy in the company of other middle-aged men squeezed into clothing that the men of 1916 did not die for? Somewhere, deep in the retail statistics, there must be a figure that tells a story of the jump in Lycra sales among men who stopped buying their own underwear years ago but who become giddy within 100 yards of a rack of ankle-length socks. And, somewhere, there is a graph with a line on it that tracks all the way from a swarm of weekend cyclists to John Gormley climbing up a south Dublin ladder in 2007.
If, as expected, the TDs of the Green Party meet some kind of electoral catastrophe today, they will probably ride out into the sunset on a bike, via a cycle lane which then merges with a bus lane, which then jumps on to a footpath and then becomes a cycle lane again before ending at a wall.
Green politicians have always cycled in a manner that makes bikes seem the ultimate in mobile self-satisfaction. Lit up, their bike clips keeping the suit trouser from being sucked into the chain, upright to the point of haughtiness. After their arrival in government it was a novelty when Green ministers first turned up at their departments, solo, on a bike. The expectation of Fianna Fáil ministers in such circumstances would be for them to turn up on the back of a tandem, with all the work being done by a Garda pedallist.
If there is going to be a physical legacy of the Greens’ time in government it will surely be the bikes found rusting in sheds across the country in a decade or two. And it is not, of course, only men who have been taking up biking, even if their get-up makes them the most obvious adopters. How many people have availed of the cycle-to-work scheme since it was introduced in 2009? We don’t know, because the Department of Finance, which administers the scheme, hasn’t kept count . But it must be well into the tens of thousands.
In the UK 400,000 bikes have been shifted through a similar scheme. Here, after a slow start, bike sales have grown strongly. Even as Ireland’s cycling infrastructure remains half-thought-out, sometimes nonsensical, often dangerous, the Greens have helped to sustain a boom in the activity. Anecdotally, this boom has continued to ignore the recession; the number of cyclists on the roads, especially at weekends, has increased visibly.
When I rang Rob Cummins, owner of Lucan store Wheelworx early on Thursday, he had already sold eight bikes that morning – every one of them through the cycle-to-work scheme, which offers tax relief on a spend of up to €1,000. He reckons that if the number of cyclists has doubled in the past couple of years, perhaps one-third of these could be attributable to the scheme. In the recession, the bike, he suggests, has become the new second car.
Extending the car analogy, the scheme mirrored the scrappage schemes by taking rusting old bikes off the road and replacing them with gleaming new machines. People became familiar with the idea of a “hybrid” as being something far cheaper than a Prius.
“People were suddenly on something they could be proud of,” says Cummins. They will go back to the shops later, attracted by the idea of upgrading, often spurred on by envy of a friend’s new wheels. Men will be boys after all.
The scheme is not entirely responsible for the cycling boom though. There have been other factors. The Dublinbikes scheme has made it acceptable to cycle around town in a suit on a surprisingly attractive scut of a bike with three gears, a large basket and suspension not much better than that on a wheelbarrow. There is also the swing towards middle-aged sport, a rebellion against the stereotype that once we hit our 30s we should let nature take its toll. Instead, the middle-aged have become runners, kite-surfers, kayakers – and cyclists.
Finally, there is one major boost for bikes: the recession. People have more time but less money and have found the bike fits neatly into that gap. The Greens helped create the problem, and out of it has come an opportunity for some, even if it was a clumsy road to success.
Anyway, the Greens will go, only to be replaced by perhaps our best-known “mamil” (middle-aged man in Lycra). Perhaps it says something about how things have shifted that Enda Kenny will be the first taoiseach we can be comfortable with seeing in skin tight Day-Glo shorts. Revolutionary indeed.
shegarty@irishtimes.com twitter.com/shanehegarty