THE President, Mrs Robinson, yesterday opened the International Ploughing Championship in Carlow by unveiling a Cairn of Peace. She warmly praised the organisers, especially the managing director and secretary of the National Ploughing Championship, Ms Anna May McHugh.
Never was presidential praise more thoroughly deserved, nor the cheerful pluck and organisational flair of the plain country people of Ireland more triumphant.
For much of the day it seemed that the Naval Service would have to deliver the President to the ploughing site, as rain arrived in vast volumes. Beneath a sky which resembled low-flying fleece, the viewing stand prepared to pipe the President aboard from her corvette. It was only in the hour before her arrival that the skies cleared, the waters subsided, and the arrival of a dove announced that other life forms had survived.
As the President, who finally arrived by helicopter, unveiled the Cairn of Peace, swallows which had begun the day somewhere over the Biscay, en route for Africa, flapped vainly against the headwind which had brought them back from where they had started last weekend. But the rain, which had earlier turned the fields into clay-soup, held off.
Making furrows in such stuff must have been like ploughing Poulaphouca.
Visitors from around the world struggled through the lakes of mud over which the organisers had, with great prescience, laid articulated steel trackway purchased cheaply after the Gulf War. Conditions resembled an earlier war on the outskirts of Ypres.
Ploughs and ploughers vanished at the far end of their furrows, strangled cries in muddy Finnish marking the bend of yet another gallant foreign contestant. An Irish Life-boats vessel battled towards a tractor which was lost with all hands even before the lifeboat could heave-to.
English visitors, in all-waxed attire, floundered in the mire like Coats of High Barboury. A weeping Spaniard reverentially whispered his final words, Costa Del Sol, and fell on his plough.
But supreme above the conditions, even as the tide rose, was the good cheer of the plain rural folk of Ireland, resistant to wind and rain and indomitable at all times.
They ate vast amounts of wondrous Irish beef, gazed in awe at the vast agricultural machines which crouched like odd animals from Star Wars.
There were limbed things for grommeting worzels while still on the tree, or innoculating sugar beet against foot and mouth, or for spraying heifers against greenfly and root-blight. The rains fell, and the limbed things sank and sank, so baffling future generations of archaeologists who will revolutionise world history by declaring that they were probably pterodactyls.
Good cheer and decency and boundless humour leave no marks for archaeologists to ponder upon. They are and were the enduring and transient qualities of the ploughing championships, one of the great festivals of Irish life.