The National Ploughing Championships has made a successful post-Covid - return despite incessant rain on the final day.
Some 70,000 people attended on Thursday as rain lashed the site from early morning and created puddles in the car parks and around many of the walkways which cross-crossed the site in Ratheniska, Co Laois.
The crowd was well down on the 115,500 patrons who came on Wednesday, a record one-day attendance for the event. Evidently the weather had an impact on the final day attendance.
Nevertheless the 277,000 people who did visit over the three days means the ploughing retains its status as the biggest event of its kind in Ireland - and perhaps in Europe too. It is down on the record attendance of 297,000 in 2019, but compares favourably with other years.
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National Ploughing Championships managing director Anna May McHugh fretted before the event that the crowds would not return, at least not the way they used to do in the past.
She was very pleased with the turnout describing it as “incredibly buoyant and positive. With so much for visitors to enjoy from quality livestock and serious machinery to fashion, celebrities, Tik Tokers and sports stars galore there was something for every member of the family to enjoy.”
The winners of the World Ploughing Championship, which took place on site, were due to be announced at a banquet on Thursday night. In the national ploughing competition Eamonn Tracey from Carlow won the overall conventional class, while Wexford man John Whelan won the reversible ploughing competition. Both men will again represent Ireland at the World Ploughing contest next year which will be held in Latvia.
There was an unexpected male winner in the National Brown Bread Championship which has been a feature of the ploughing for many years.
Daragh O’Brien, a 36-year-old surveyor and part-time golfer from Naas, Co Kildare, won the coveted €15,000 first prize and, as importantly, a contract to provide all 152 Aldi stores in Ireland with his brown bread.
He only entered the competition at the behest of his wife Carol, who told him his brown bread was great. He has a suitable pedigree as his grandfather was a baker, his mother was a home economics teacher and his sister is a cook.
He joked that he was doing his bit for “equality” by being the first man to win the competition in its nine year history.
What is his secret? He says the recipe is the traditional one of strong white flour, wholemeal flour, buttermilk and ground sugar - but he differed from the other contestants by throwing a capful of water into the oven which emerges as steam.
A Kilkenny company, IAM agricultural machinery won the prestigious machine of the year at the championships for their Farmdroid FD20 product - an automatic seeding and weeding robot.
The NPA organisers will now have to decide whether or not the 900 acre site should be used for the championships next year.
Though the site itself held up well to the rain, there were many complaints about the long delays in traffic accessing the site with some motorists stuck in traffic for an hour and a half on the approaches into Ratheniska.
