THE world ploughing championships opened on Teagasc's rolling acres outside Carlow town yesterday, alongside Ireland's largest marijuana plantation. Some 40,000 people eased past the dope, speculating about the peculiar plants growing there for research purposes, while the odd New Age travellers pinched themselves, then vanished into the tall undergrowth, yodelling in glee. At the entrance to the vast encampment, the Customs Drugs Unit sniffer dogs, there for innocent display purposes, woofed indignantly, the bust of a lifetime going begging.
Among the most celebrated guests at the competition, chests, chinking with campaign medals, were veterans of The Charge of the Plight Brigade, whose gallantry in, Killarney last week informed the world of the parlous state of the Irish beef farmer.
Wide-eyed boys sat at their feet while they reminisced of the day that they scattered the European ministers of agriculture, and brought glory to their land.
Rural Ireland yesterday must have appeared post-nuclear, its farmhouses deserted, its cows keening over unpeopled pastures, its fields unworked. The entire agricultural sector appeared to have watched the movements of that other Killarney veteran, Minister for Agriculture Ivan Yates, and decided to follow him up to Carlow. The Minister was equipped with an Irish Times umbrella, no doubt as a personal protection weapon in the event of another Siege of Killarney.
He ambled through the tented city covering 300 acres, umbrella at the ready, past the carnival's thousands of stands. Even the Revenue Commissioners, no doubt hoping to make the acquaintance of a good few farmers for the first time and maybe even arrange to have a look under the odd mattress, have a stall. It was as deserted as a feminist baconship in Tehran.
Barely less deserted was the curiously unwatched horsedrawn ploughing competition, in which the only ploughwoman in Ireland, Zwena McCullough, nee Quigley from Blarney, followed her two hooved specimens of muscled docility, Jessie and Jim, down the furrow. "It's an addiction," she admitted between furrows. "It needs to be. I've never been as cold in my life as I have been in bad weather doing this." Then she returned to her passion: ploughing Quigley, ploughing slowly, to victory.
Magnificent horses - Clydsdales, Shires, Irish Draughts - slowly drew lines in the Carlow loam, heads down, and watched by a truly wondrous beast, a Breton draught called Gitane, owned by Gerald Bolger of Athy, Co Kildare. Gitane stretched and posed like a model, flaring the odd nostril and looking Iordly.
Farmers in flat caps, suits and wellingtons, their faces creased in oriental squints from the wind and rain, shuffled in amiable confusion through the cattle competitions. Mervyn Lloyd from Mohill, Co Leitrim, was singing the praises of the Limousin cattle which stood in their stalls like large brown cars, while Pauline Dunne from Wexford sliced a salutary warning to them all from her fresh Limousine beef sandwich stall nearby.
The prize-winning Charollais, defeating entries from Drs Ryan, and O'Reilly, was Kevin and Cynthin Foley's Royal Helium, which, is like a vast sheep after a vaster shampoo and set. He has sired 54 calves this year, and was smirking's something shocking.
He no doubt does it the traditional way, which is increasingly uncommon these days, as the good people earnestly dispensing advice in the stall called Semen World could testify. Next to Semen World was Seaquim - which stands, of course, for quality minerals from the sea.