Colm O'Regan: From cow-tipping to fashion shows — I've seen it all at the Ploughing
Eoin Hand in action in the senior horse class on the second day of the Ploughing. Picture: Dan Linehan
In many space and fantasy movies there is a bit where the heroes go to some sort of exotic planet or country. Called something like Al-Khazakhtar.
They land in a bazaar with cliched Middle Eastern music, lads with turbans, someone leading a thing that looks like a camel. Snake charmers, shrouded women giving you side-eye.
If they were ever to sum up Planet Ireland, the spaceship should land next to the Ploughing.
Our space-suited heroes being led through a bewildering array of country music, brown bread competitions, pony relays, sheds of cattle, cow-tipper demos, millions of euro worth of equipment, 40% of children carrying a hurley, every different type of possible Irish country head represented, tents for both types of AI - generative and bovine.
I was late, the last one into carpark 24. That’s not right. I felt like the useless son who’d slept through the milking.
I would have to rush through everything. But that’s not how the ploughing works. To paraphrase the , one does not simply just walk through the ploughing. I was just in the gate when I waylaid myself at the vintage section.
You can’t walk past a 100-year-old tractor that’s so old it has pre-pneumatic tyres. A man called Ger explained gears and flywheels to me. We both agreed there was great stuff made in them days.
Once into the main area, I join others staring at the map trying to figure out where they are.
A voice from the tannoy alerts me to the various things about to start. Block 5 Row 29 Stall 529. When the co-ordinates for a stall sound like a New York phone number you know this is big.
I hear a low. There’s a young bull inside the tent near me. I’ve never been body-shamed by a bull before but dammit that fella was fit and better dressed than I am.
I move onto machinery. How do you browse the milking gear. It’s not a set of earbuds. This stuff costs hundreds of thousands. What possible questions would I have to ask?
But still a robot milking machine prompts a few questions. The Alfa Laval people were kind and explained how a farmer has finally been able to go to a child’s football match because he can monitor the milking from pitchside on his phone.
In the inventions area, next to the electric tractor, the same four demo sheep were rotating through the ingenious Cotter handling crate all day. Showing how they could be hypothetically dosed. Sheep get a bad press but they are serious workers at equipment demos.
Shortly after chatting to the Timbercroc log holder people - I definitely felt qualified to talk about that after purchasing my first chainsaw in Lidl - I heard a microphone say: “Stunning and only €59.99, online, for feck sake, seriously girls where would you be going?”
The tent was full. Men and women queuing to get in. The fashion show. This is the essence of the ploughing. Wearing wellies and looking at a catwalk. The juxtapositions are everywhere.
Over in Block X Row Y Stall a million, Micheál Martin is with Jim Gavin outside the Fianna Fáil tent. Fianna Fail-looking people and guards are around. But relaxed enough.
Five yards across the aisle, the health and safety man is demonstrating what will happen to your leg in a PTO shaft and there’s a sort of explosion as it mangles a fake leg and no one flinches.
Then a series of vehicle beeps. The crowd parts. A buggy goes through laden with replacement toilet paper. Priorities. As the photos continue several people shout "Free Palestine".
All within five seconds.
The actual ploughing or Ploughing Ploughing is tucked away outside the main arena. You have to get your hand stamped to get back in. Ploughing is in the metaphorical smoking area of the ploughing. Even though hardly anyone is smoking fags here. Or even vaping.
I was too late for it of course. That’s what you get for being late. Missing the actual work going on. But I got talking to the Foster family - their surname, not the people who changed my life- from Illinois.
We talked about their small farm - 350 acres - and vintage machinery. Had they seen Ger’s 100-year-old tractor engine earlier? They had. We talked flywheels. I hoped there wouldn’t be follow-up questions.
After about three hours feasting, my thoughts turn to getting out before the traffic. But even though I knew every second here is a minute on the road, I couldn’t walk past the cow-tipping demo. It’s an actual thing, not an urban myth.
A mechanical grab you can put on the back of a tractor to gently pick up and rotate even the largest of bulls for getting their hooves done and an examination. They’ve been making these for 15 years.
Why have I not heard about this before?
You ask yourself that question a lot at the ploughing.
