The National Transport Authority has allocated €290m to local authorities to be spent on walking and cycling infrastructure this year. However, councils in Limerick and Galway recently voted down plans for more cycle lanes in their cities.
Organisers of 'school cycle buses' in those cities have said the lack of cycle lanes will place children attempting to reach school on bikes at serious risk.
A 'school cycle bus' involves children cycling to school in a group, aided by adult marshals.
Conor Buckley is a parent on the Limerick school cycle bus which gives children an opportunity to cycle to and from school each day.
"The cycle bus is great. We cycle across from the north side of the city into the city centre every morning, it gives the kids a chance to have a bit of freedom and have a bit of autonomy about how they get to school, how they come home, and they get lots of exercise.
"And I guess when they arrived at school, they're fully awake and had a bit of exercise," Conor told the This Week programme.
But their route is not always straightforward.
"We have had little accidents on the cycle bus. We have had cars aggressive towards us. I have to say the majority of motorists that see us are familiar to us and have been polite and have been very respectful.
"But you wouldn't dream of letting your kids go and cycle that route on their own. There has been some government interventions to make it safer.
"There has been a cycle lane put across Shannon Bridge and that's been a huge improvement for us, but the roundabout, I'm not aware of any plans to change that.
"It's been talked about for a long, long time, but I'm not aware of any plan that's in motion or any funding that's put beside changing that roundabout as is," Mr Buckley said.
"The South Circular Road route would come down onto that roundabout and I guess that roundabout is a link between the north and south of the city. So when you cross the bridge ... it's a blockage.
"There are three bridges in the city centre. The other two bridges are extremely tight and there's city centre traffic with buses on them.
"This is the safer bridge to cross, but when you hit the roundabout, there's a blockage. There's a barrier to cycling that's been identified in an official report by Arup in 2016 and we still don't see action on it, eight years later," Mr Buckley added.
Earlier this year, Fianna Fáil TD Willie O'Dea called on city councillors to vote against a proposed active travel route on the South Circular Road.
"Unfortunately, what I do object [to] here however, this is particularly pertinent to the South Circular Road, is this one-size-fits-all approach.
"In other words, the approach is that there's loads of money now for cycle lanes. So we'll put cycle lanes wherever we like, literally whatever somebody, some committee, or some expert says, if there's a cycle lane to go between point A and point B we put it down there.
"Sometimes you see in cities, particularly old cities like Limerick, in places like the South Circular Road, the damage done to the lives of residents in those areas where the cycle lanes pass outweighs the benefit of the cycle lanes, and you'll find in many cases that, even when that happens, you can always get alternatives in most cases anyway," he said.
Deputy O'Dea believes more cycle lanes will have a significant impact on residents on the South Circular Road.
"A lot of the people on the South Circular Road need to drive to their door. A lot of them don't have parking spaces in their houses. Even if they do have spaces, it makes people extremely nervous when they have to drive out into a cycle lane.
"They have people who visit them - local, voluntary organisations. Sometimes they have to get food, gas, delivered to their houses. This initial proposal, for the South Circular Road made all that incredibly difficult," said Mr O'Dea.
Galway City has school cycle buses too. Plans for a cycle lane at Renmore were voted down by local councillors this month.
Green Party Senator Pauline O'Reilly said they need to look at what other European cities are doing.
"It's a solution that will have part cycling infrastructure, part shared road but ultimately it takes away all of the pinch points that were dangerous, so it was going to be really changing the lives of people and particularly it went through past a couple of schools.
"Now we can't even do school streets around those schools because the cycling infrastructure isn't going ahead. I think that all of the families around there are being let down now," Senator O'Reilly said.
"Both in Utrecht and in Amsterdam, they've also had difficulties where it was very car dominated and they've had to put in the best kind of solutions that they could.
"Nothing's perfect, but from every different point of view they've seen, well this is the amount of space we have, what's the best we can do with that space? It might not be perfect, but let's do it.
"So on roundabouts, for instance, that's the crunch point I think here in Galway, they give much more space so that the cars almost have to go out of the roundabout at a 90-degree angle so that they see all around them and they see the cyclists coming," Senator O'Reilly said.
Neasa Ní Bheilbigh is a teacher at Gaelscoil Mhic Amhlaigh in Knocknacarra and is a marshal on the Galway cycle bus which can have up to 40 children at a time.
She said they are crying out for cycle lanes.
"There's such a demand, and there's such a culture for cycling in Galway in spite of the lack of infrastructure. With the school cycle bus, the children have their activity built into [their] day, and then it's a fantastic start to the morning. So the children arrive ready to learn," Ms Ní Bheilbigh said.
Parents in Limerick and Galway told This Week that they feel school cycle buses are the only safe option available to their children when it comes to cycling in cities.
Brian Caulfield, professor in transportation at Trinity College Dublin, believes they are correct.
"They're probably right because of the number of vehicles that go to these schools, and you see them, I know I live quite near a school here in Dublin and the vehicles aren't small, they're big SUVs that are parking up outside of these schools, and they take [up] much more road space.
"Your outcome from being hit by an SUV is going to be an awful lot worse, so I don't blame parents for being concerned.
"I know in Galway there's definitely a tradition of that recently that they've been voting down a lot of very good infrastructure. I suppose it's a fear of the unknown.
"If we want to get to our climate change targets, we need to get people cycling and the Dutch, that's how they did it. They got the kids cycling first," Professor Caulfield said.
