National Ploughing Championships is a credit to organisers

Madam Editor,

The organisers of this year’s National Ploughing Championships, at Screggan near Tullamore, 19 to 21 September, deserve huge praise. They overcame Wednesday’s deluge and came up smiling on Thursday.

It shows what can be achieved by ordinary people who work cooperatively. Farming is still our biggest native industry. Screggan showed it at its most bullish. Not only did rural folk travel long distances there, but many city slickers and a few of the jet set arrived there too. The media people were there in force and many of them spun and spun the yarns that this annual event shows a reviving Ireland at its best. The impression a visitor from Mars would get is that farmers are filthy rich.

O yes, there was “space age” machinery on show and as one farmer remarked “We can soon set these machines to work, by themselves, in the fields and we can relax by the fireside”.

Yes, such machines will lead the way, as more and more wealthy people invest in factory-farm type of activity. That is the drift - commercial investment and, as in Canada and the US, “suitcase farming” by business executives. The “small farmer” is on the way out.

During Wednesday’s deluge, a small farmer from Co Leitrim said: “Well the rest of Ireland now sees the kind of conditions we have been ploughing through all summer”. President Michael D., a man of great intellect and integrity, formally launched The Ploughing on Tuesday. He certainly spoke for me. In a few words, he cut to the chase and exposed “The Hidden Ireland”.

He regretted the social decline of rural Ireland, with shops, post offices etc closing and the withdrawal of vital rural services.

Able young people are leaving in droves from their native rural areas. Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is, again, unfolding before our very eyes.

I’m saying to our political-machine gurus “Spin and sound bites will not be enough to solve this.

The machine must be made serve people rather than people serving the machine”.

Yours Sincerely

Cllr Des Guckian, Dromod, Co Leitrim.