Cork agricultural shows, meeting place of the great and the good
Eva Dullea relaxes in the shade at ‘The Experience Fest’ at Cork Summer Show, a hugely successful event orgainised since 2017 by the Munster Agricultural Society with the support of Cork County Council. The annual event now attracts more than 50,000 visitors.
Since 2017, Cork County Council has been at the centre of the success story that is the Cork Summer Show.
Now regularly attracting 50,000 visitors or more to its mid-June two day venue, the event is organised by the Munster Agricultural Society, which is delighted to have Cork County Council as the lead sponsor of the Show.
The Council is equally happy to support an event which it sees as a great attraction for visitors, tourists and local residents, but also representative of all that Co Cork has to offer, including its great food, its music, its farming heritage and innovation.
The association is fitting for the Show event which grew with the city and county, and has enjoyed "a long and productive relationship" with the Cork County and City Councils, according to the book "Munster Agricultural Society, The Story of Cork Show Grounds" written by local historian Kieran McCarthy, who is the current Lord Mayor of Cork.
Now billed as Cork’s biggest two-day festival of food, farming and fun, the Cork Summer Show has been running in one form or another since the 19th century.
The Cork Agricultural Society dates from the 1880s. Their first shows were at the Corn Exchange (now City Hall) in the centre of Cork. The event's growing success required a larger and permanent home, and in 1892, the Society leased 27 acres at the Cork Racecourse in Ballintemple from the Corporation.
It became the home of the Cork Summer Show, and the HQ of the now renamed Munster Agricultural Society, until 2008. A compulsory purchase order to make way for the Cork South Docklands meant that the Society had to find new grounds, with the search leading to Curraheen, a few miles west of the city. Since 2013, the event has thrived at Curraheen.
The Council's association usually includes the Mayor of the County of Cork attending the show opening, and a Cork County Council marquee hosting a presentation of the wide range of services provided by and supported by local government.
Behind the scenes, Cork County Council, with its Local Community Development Committees taking part in the LEADER (Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l'Économie Rurale) rural development National Cooperation Measure, is involved not only with the Cork Summer Show, but with more than 40 other agricultural shows in Ireland.
This is part of the community-led local development in rural communities for which the EU's LEADER programme has provided resources across the EU since 1991. Included are co-operation projects which extend beyond local areas, and one of them is the ISA SuperShow Platform launched last year by the Irish Shows Association (ISA).
It tackled the increasing difficulty in attracting people into volunteer administrative positions in local events such as agricultural shows. The ISA set about seeking funding to develop a cloud-based show management system to reduce the administrative burden on volunteers.
Following investment in market research and a feasibility study, the ISA went to tender and awarded the contract to Dotser, an Irish software development and integration company.
The project is part-funded by LEADER, which is supported in Ireland by the Department of Rural and Community Development and the Department of Agriculture.
The show management project is led by the Monaghan Integrated Development CLG, Avondhu Blackwater Partnership CLG, Galway Rural Development CLG, and Southwest Mayo Development Company CLG. The West Cork LCDC is also a project partner. Cork County Council has established three LCDCs, aligned with the local government administrative boundaries of North, South and West Cork.
The aim of the Council's LCDCs is to enhance the strategic planning and co-ordination of local and community development activity, including the LEADER Rural Development Programme.
For the coming agricultural showing season, 45 ISA member shows will be live on the new system. In Co Cork, they include the annual shows at Clonakilty, Schull, Ballygarvan, Bandon, Skibbereen (the Carbery Show), Barryroe, Charleville, and Dunmanway, and the Cork Summer Show. A number of other Munster shows use the ISA SuperShow Platform.
The Minister for Rural and Community Development, Heather Humphreys (whose department provides €1 million of funding per year for 122 Irish agricultural shows) commended the ISA for "the great work being done in digitising and future-proofing the shows".
Meanwhile, Dotser, supported by Enterprise Ireland, has successfully gone international with its services, including the SuperShow agricultural events management platform, enjoying great success as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.
SuperShow radically simplifies the administration burden for some of the largest agricultural shows across the world, from the Tullamore Show (in Dotser's home town), to the Cork Summer Show, to the New Zealand Agricultural Show.
