We were saddened to hear last week of the passing of cardiologist and pioneering public health campaigner in Ireland Professor Risteard Mulcahy. Risteard was a member of Dublin Cycling Campaign since its foundation in the early 1990’s.

He was particularly active in the early years of the Campaign when Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr John Gormley, set up the Lord Mayor’s Commission on Cycling with the brief of mapping out a proposed cycle network for Dublin City. This report informed the first cycle network plan for Dublin City in the late 1990’s and, over the following decade or so, much of the network was developed mainly along the main radial routes coming into the city (although the quality of cycle facilities was not up the standard that the authors of the Commission’s report had envisaged).

Risteard remained a friend of Dublin Cycling Campaign and was the subject of film-maker Paddy Cahill’s video just a few years ago - definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. An inspiration at 90 years of age!

Kirsten Doherty and Mike McKillen (ex-Chairs of DCC) attended the funeral or Prof. Mulcahy on Monday 4th July 2016 on behalf of organised cyclists. Mike commented that “Prof Mulcahy was more than a cardiologist advocating exercise for many patients by regularly getting out on a bicycle as he also railed against Man’s despoliation of our environment by modernity in its damaging forms - pollution cause by motorised transport”. He published a book on his musing about the environment taken from his blog ‘The Font of Knowledge’.

He would have been pleased that Cyclist.ie - the Irish Cycling Advocacy Network just last month appointed Prof. Donal O’Shea (Endocrinology at St. Vincent’s University Hospital), the renowned expert on obesity, as its first Hon. President thus continuing the role played by medical advocates in cycling promotion for better public health outcomes. See here

The obituary from the Irish Independent can be read here and the one from the Irish Times here.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.