Twice now in recent weeks I’ve witnessed people frantically searching for a bike that just isn’t there any more in Dublin. Like any major city, the robbing of bicycles is somewhat commonplace in Dublin, and many cyclists will have lost a bicycle to more opportunistic Dubliners. There is nothing new about bicycles vanishing on their owners in Dublin of course.

Digging into the archives, I found that the theft of bicycles featured heavily in the Irish media in the early twentieth century. This was a time of course when there were many more bicycles in the city. In October 1919, the Irish Independent bemoaned the fact that Dublin was not a city in which a mans bicycle was safe, warning that:

Dublin is getting a bad reputation for the larceny of motors and cycles, in respect of some of which, at all events, the accused have come from across the channel. “No man”, said the Right Hon. Recorder, “can leave his bicycle without keeping his hand on it in this city.”

The paper was reporting on a court case involving a seaman by the name of John A. Johnson, caught in the act. In court, he gave an address in Liverpool as his own. A seemingly endless cycle (pun intended) of court cases involving stolen bicycles appear in the newspapers of the period, with harsh sentences handed out.

Throughout the 1920s, many Dublin youths were sent to industrial schools for robbing bicycles, with a judge claiming in 1924 that “there would be none of this nefarious robbing of bicycles in Dublin if it were not for ‘receiving merchants'”. A massive black market existed for bicycles in the Dublin of the day, and quite simply the process involved “young lads stealing bicycles which were handed over to other people, changed and disposed of.”

In February 1936, it was claimed in The Irish Times that “hundreds of bicycles were disappearing daily in the city.” The paper claimed that they were “being taken morning after morning from outside churches.” The attitude of authorities was that this was a longstanding problem in Dublin, with six months hard labour seeming a standard punishment at the time for the offence. One judge remarked that “it seems easy to take bicycles, and just as easy to get rid of the stolen bicycles. I would be very happy to have any person charged with receiving stolen bicycles before me, as I consider that the only sentence for these offenders is imprisonment.”

Even guidebooks to Dublin discussed the problem of bike theft in the city. In G. Ivan Morris’ classic In Dublin’s Fair City (1947) he warned of the dangers for bicycle owners in the city, but he also noted that “the cyclists of Dublin are a sight to behold, especially during lunch hour and between five and six o’clock in the evening, when they appear in thousands amidst the traffic of O’Connell Street, and the numbers of them rival Holland and Denmark.”

Dublin’s problem of vanishing bikes pops up in That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland During the Second World War. In it, Clair Wills notes that:

In the spring of 1943 the unfortunate poor were hit by a pawn strike, which caused real consternation in the slum districts of the city. Rather than pawn the Sunday suit, families were driven to sell their bedclothes and then their furniture. Others may have been driven to make money through the stolen bike racket, which seems to have been highly organised. The number of bicycles stolen in Dublin in any one week ran to three figures, suggesting that Flann O’Brien’s famous stolen-bike sketch in his novel The Third Policeman owed as much to fact as imagination.

Wartime bicycle stealing was discussed in the Dáil, when Willie Norton of the Labour Party made the claim in April 1943 that:

It is perfectly true, of course, that a new type of crime has arisen in recent years. The shortage of bicycles and the impossibility of buying them, except at very high prices, has provided a temptation to steal bicycles. I definitely believe that this is a wartime vice which will probably subside when bicycles again come on the market and when they are within the purchasing power of the mass of the people who require them; but we nevertheless have a very serious situation—one in which economic conditions are contributing to make criminals of persons who formerly were honest citizens and one in which the shortage of certain types of commodities is producing a dishonest outlook and a dishonest frame of mind on the part of hitherto honest citizens.

In September 1952, the Irish Independent sent a reporter to Kevin Street Garda Station, who told the reporter that “three or four rooms” in the station were taken up by recovered stolen bicycles, and that “in the first seven months of this year no fewer than 3,781 bicycles were reported stolen in Dublin.” The simple problem, Gardaí noted, was that people were careless and far too trusting.

By the 1970s, the stealing of bicycles in Dublin features less and less in newspapers.This interesting article from the Sunday Independent in 1972 notes that “in 1962 there were over 5,000 stolen machines in the stores of Kevin Street, while in 1970 the number had dwindled to 2,318.”

This post is just a tiny selection of the content buried in the archives as far as vanishing Dublin bikes go. What’s the purpose of the post you may be wondering? Well, the next time someone tells you “it would never have happened in my day”, be sure to tell them you were undoubtedly more likely to lose your bicycle in the Dublin of the 1930s or the 1950s!