WABA blog post by Fionnuala Quinn: Small Fields, Hedgerows and U2 by Bicycle

As part of the WABA Women's Bicycling Forum, Fionnuala Quinn of FABB recently posted the article Small Fields, Hedgerows and U2 by Bicycle on the WABA blog. Fionnuala, recipient of WABA’s 2011 Advocacy Award and manager of the Women Cycling Project, will be a speaker at the forum which will be held on Monday, December 12 from 6-8pm at DC Public Library - West End Branch. You can register online.

From Fionnuala's article:

My mother recalls the great honor of being brought by her father on the donkey and cart into Boyle for her first new bicycle. She rode nine miles back on the bicycle that was purchased for the huge sum of ten pounds specifically so she could bypass the local national school and attend the better school further away.

A generation earlier, a bicycle had been similarly bought for her mother so that she too could have access to better schooling. Those Raleigh and Royal Enfield bicycles allowed them to travel the Roscommon roads widely, riding between the hedgerows and small fields that hadn’t changed for hundreds of years. My mother talks of happy times riding with her sisters and collecting other girls en route to school in Elphin five miles away. Before the bicycle, the women and girls of rural Ireland had never had this freedom of travel and the options that brought with it.

Read the rest of her article.