As a republic, Ireland doesn’t go in for royalty, but there are two categories of citizen who run it close. The first is anyone who excels in the – strictly amateur – Gaelic Athletic Association sports of hurling and Gaelic football. A GAA star could cure cancer and reverse global warming but still be better known for that cracking goal at Ballymaloe in 2009.
The second is Anna May McHugh, 90, who has run “the Ploughing” – Ireland’s version of our Mystery Creek national agricultural Fieldays – for more than 50 years after 20 years as a more junior employee. She took charge in the 1970s and built the event into a massive enterprise that is estimated to have contributed more than NZ$10 billion to the Irish economy.
The National Ploughing Championships, one of Europe’s biggest outdoor events, takes place every autumn across 324ha, with 40ha just for the 17,000 exhibitors’ stalls. It attracted 244,000 visitors this year, more than twice the attendees at Fieldays.
Here, we have prized livestock, welly-throwing (that’s gumboots to us), tractors as far as the eye can see and schmoozing politicians almost as numerous.
New Zealand A&P Show habitués would feel quite at home, but for a couple of local peculiarities. One is the frequency of young men clutching sticks with paddles on the end. These are camáin, or hurleys, and they’re what Irish lads graduate to after they grow out of teddy bears – and sometimes before. They take their hurleys everywhere, even to the Ploughing, for you never know when GAA greatness might beckon.
Then there’s fashion. While the punters at Irish race meetings, and even your average supermarket queue, could be mistaken for royal wedding guests, the Ploughing ethos is emphatically practical. The best-dressed prizes went to a woman in a no-nonsense khaki gilet over shirt and pants and a stout chap in a lived-in-looking suit and plaid shirt. As a local explained to the Irish Times, one has to dress with the certainty that one is apt to “walk into a heap of muck”.
Not that there was much to trouble visitors’ wellies, with locals practically apologising for the unusual absence of mud or rain. An ancient tradition akin to that of the Ploughing itself ‒ the budging of cars hopelessly bogged in the pastoral carparks ‒ languished uncontested this year.
A further unique feature is the willingness of hundreds to stand through a near half-hour speech from a politician. Irish President Michael D Higgins, 83, one grand institution paying tribute to another, detained a huge crowd while he traversed the history of Irish agriculture and the evils besetting geopolitics. The attentive audience was testament to his approval rating, a globally remarkable 90%.
A less-willing audience also beheld another institution: the perma-protesting Burke family, seldom more than a week or two away from the headlines, court or a good harangue in a public place. This County Mayo clan make your average grizzlers seem indolent in their range of claimed grievances, from religious persecution – they refuse to acknowledge gay or transgender folk – to being picked on in their professions.
They turned out to shout at visitors to the Law Society’s stall because one of the younger Burkes can’t find a barrister to sponsor his legal studies. Sure, there’s more than one way to have a good craic at the Ploughing.
There’s the ploughing itself. Whether using strapping horses or trusty battered tractors, the artistry of a straight furrow remains mystical here, notwithstanding no-dig and regenerative agricultural trends. Ploughing prowess – almost as aristocratic as GAA stardom – runs in families. If only the Burkes would try it.
