Dublin is a great city packed with many attractions and has something for everyone - and we aim to help you to get the most from your cycling visit. Check out http://www.visitdublin.com/ for a full flavour of what Dublin has to offer.

Dublin has its origins as a Viking city and is basically a city of villages. We celebrate the Millennial anniversary this year of the Battle of Clontarf when the Danes, led by King Sitric, were defeated in 1014 on Dublin Bay. Today we like to think that each village serves a different purpose and houses a particular breed of Dubliner. The poets, the artists, the dreamers, the fashionistas, the foodies, the storytellers and the true-blues, they have all carved out little havens, villages of like-mindedness within the patchwork of the city.

It is a city with two faces – one towards Dublin Bay on the Irish Sea and the other to the Dublin hills - so it offers relatively flat cycling around the city but you can easily head to the hills for more adventure. Try Ticknock MTB trail.

It is a human-scale modern European city with beautiful Georgian and Victorian architecture along with the expected public buildings – National Gallery and Museum, Dublin Castle, House of Parliament, Trinity College Dublin (founded 1592), Botanic Gardens (with famous Turner curvilinear glasshouses), Phoenix Park, one of the largest enclosed parks in any European city, which also houses a zoo.

On the cycling front, the numbers cycling in the city have doubled in the last 5 years - the cycling modal share in Dublin City is now almost 8% - and the Dublin Bikes public bike scheme is one of the most successful in Europe in terms of the usage of bikes. Dublin Cycling Campaign, a lead member of Cyclist.ie - Ireland’s Cycling Advocacy Group, is (we believe!) one of hardest working cycling campaign groups in Europe and we celebrated our 20th birthday last year. We have an action-packed programme of events all year round (including a spectacular bicycle float in the St. Patrick’s Day parade each year! - see below) and our members have been attending the ECF AGM and the Velo-city Cycling Planning Conferences since the mid to late 1990’s. Dublin still has a huge amount to learn from other cities and cultures in terms of bicycle planning, but we believe that we have lots of campaigning tricks and successes to share with our ECF colleagues!

A most important further reason to come to Dublin is, of course, so as to partake in some proper socialising and mixing & mingling with the locals! We plan to achieve the optimum balance of productive meetings and convivial, craic-filled, post-meeting, networking sessions!